published
updated
I've been wanting to show you the spells I've been practicing or outline my thoughts on the nature of the business usage of my craft. At times I've even considered starting a campfire hide-out and inviting you around for warmth and comfort against the cold online void. However those ideas remain seedlings, yet to even be germinated. Instead I come incanting an invocation detailing the intracacies of my inadequate infrastructure. Darkness has been gathering in the alcoves of my electronic home and it is time to dispell it.
This post also details some of my research in solving these problems. It's fun using a personal public space as a todo list and a method of accountability, especially when you're reavealing where your weaknesses are and what you haven't yet done. Now before the paranoia takes over, lets dive in, but be warned this is for the technical.
Remote access to my local network
I host a ton of services on my local network, specifically on my old laptop that I call bowl and use as a server. From Nextcloud to Wallabag it hosts both critical and leisurely aspects of my life online. But I have no way to access bowl from outside my network. I want to configure tinc or WireGaurd, but haven't gotten around to it yet (and WireGaurd hasn't been mainlined into the kernel yet). This leaves things in a less than ideal situation as it also removes me from monitoring my network and applications and that is a very bad thing.
Backup automation
Oh god it's everyones worst nightmare, a hard-drive dies and that was the only copy of all the information stored on there. Ouch. I'm still vulnerable to this sort of thing. The hard-drive in bowl isn't backed up, and that's the device that holds all my other backups! Uh-oh. This could really spell disaster. I do have a different backup of the data backed up on bowl but this isn't ideal. I want automatic, timed backups to both a remote source and bowl. I'm currently looking into borg and blackblaze, but I need more than just my laptop(curve) and computer(box) backed up. My phone(line) backup scheme is a forest that still needs exploring.
GPG Key
The GPG key I currently use has got the wrong email address, and is used to encrypt a bunch of my personal data. I either need to find a way to change the email and update my keys, or change all of it. I'm worried about losing this too, and looking into dark-crystal to back it up
DAT Autopublish
Unless you had been paying keen interest to my git repository, you would not have noticed that I automated the ability to update this site. Every time I finish an article, it gets published immediately, just like how it should be. But I haven't yet implemented this for publishing to the DAT clone of my website, in fact I think that website may be down. So much for Web+.
Nix OS
Perhaps more of desire for robustness than a broken piece of infrastructure, I hope to get all my infrastructure defined in code, reproducable and well maintained, like my dot files. I think Nix would be a cool solution to this, but there are other alternatives too like Ansible, Chef and Puppet, but those don't have the required aesthetic factor, nor use functional programming. I hear all have similar levels of annoyance when it comes to the DSL that configures each program.