This was a live blog. It is now static, and preserved here, in this log entry.
2024-08-19 04:04:17 UTC
I’m leaving Goderich now, so the server is going down tomorrow morning. It will be on for the rest of tonight.
OK, so first of all, I was accepted into Helsingin yliopisto, and was then immediately faced with the challenge of migrating my server to Helsinki. This server was a wonderful accumulation of disparate parts; a mini PC, an external two-drive RAID 1 array, and a UPS. Its name was puffball.
And it was beautiful.
observes moment of silence over the death and transfiguration of puffball
But alas, it was just too much shit to take with me on a plane to Helsinki. My first plan to downsize was to just pack the RAID array, then buy the rest of a computer once I’d arrived in Helsinki. But that would have meant days of downtime, and even the external RAID array on its own wasn’t particularly light. Months later, I thought of a better way.
Years ago, I had swapped out my laptop, proxima’s DVD reader for a hard drive caddy and a second hard drive. I had just realised that this would allow me to run a RAID array on my laptop. That solved everything. I wouldn’t need to buy new hardware, besides the two 932 GiB SSDs I would need to establish the RAID. I would have a UPS. Every laptop has a UPS. And there would be no downtime besides the time the laptop would spend in transit.
So, I backed up all of the data on proxima that I wanted to keep to puffball.
Then, I copied puffball’s data and configuration almost verbatim to the laptop and its new SSDs using cp -a.
Finally, since this was still my main laptop, I installed sway, firefox, zoom, and all of the other stuff I needed my laptop to do.
The resulting laptop was a new host, which was neither proxima, nor puffball.
observes moment of silence over the death and transfiguration of proxima
I decided to call that new laptop robert. I was receiving emails on robert weeks before the final move.
It was a pretty good solution. But then, I got ambitious.
What if I could reduce the downtime even further? What if I could allow the internet to access my laptop for as long as it is connected to any kind of wifi—even public wifi?
How would you get a public IP? How would you forward ports to your laptop? That’s impossible!
Not if you have a VPS running openvpn, connected to your server. Which is exactly what I already had set up for unrelated reasons. It was actually a fairly simple change in my server’s configuration. Rather than using the VPS’s public IP for just SMTP (long story…), I am now using my VPS’s public IP for everything.
When you connected to https://toombs.earth/live/ just now, you actually connected to the VPS. There’s no web server running on the VPS, though. Just openvpn. The VPS forwarded the connection to my laptop. And since my laptop is the openvpn client, it doesn’t need a public IP or open incoming ports of its own!
This might be the first time ever that somebody travelled with a working web+matrix+email server.
I’m going to bed now.
2024-08-19 22:27:18 UTC
I have done the impossible.
It was harder than I thought it would be, but my server is finally online. On Pearson International Airport’s public wifi. My email server is working great. I can tell because the endless stream of spam from specifically the Russian IP ranges is back. Thankyou for helping me test my mail server, Russian scumbags! :D
It was difficult getting DNS to work.
openvpn uses local DNS servers by default.
And when openvpn is configured to act as the default gateway, it assumes that the local DNS servers can still be contacted through the local subnet.
This fails, though, when the DNS servers are only accessible through the local gateway, which is how Pearson does it.
My local subnet is 10.27.152.0/21, but the DNS servers are on a different local subnet, which is only accessible through the local gateway, 10.27.152.1.
To fix the problem, I had to manually add my VPS’s DNS servers to /etc/resolv.conf.head.
These DNS servers are assigned to me automatically via DHCP, though, so they could change at any time.
Basically, I’m counting on that not happening for a really long time.
Because I really doubt it will.
Pearson must have really been improved since the post-pandemic madness. It’s totally fine, now. I’m just chillin' in the lobby at the bar, watching the sun set. There’s a bit of an accumulation of anonymous garbage next to me. Either this is normal for airports, or Pearson has conditioned me to expect the very worst out of airports.
OK, now, I’m going to go look for a bike on tori.fi.
Nothing worked for the whole time after Pearson, for various reasons.
2024-08-20 21:22:43 UTC
I made it to Helsinki! Now that my laptop is connected to the more conventional wifi of my airbnb, the VPN is working perfectly again. The server has been successfully relocated to Finland! This concludes this live blog. Now, I’m going to get some sleep.