Some server updates

Over the period of this last year I somehow did multiple changes on my little server which runs this site.

Gitea

For a long time I had issues with Gitea being unresponsive in quicker requests. Now in retrospective I think it could be because the Mariadb was not configured properly to accept many connections at once but only the default number. Well, I solved it by changing the database type to SQLite and it runs nicely now.

Jenkins

I removed Jenkins as my back-end builder solution. For my purpose of running website build after I push new commits into the repository once in few weeks or months, it is a huge overkill. On top of that, it required frequent care after each update to work properly with Gitea (plugin updates) which I do not want to manage anymore.

I replaced stuff previously running under Jenkins by simple shell scripts which I start by cron during night. Works nicely.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

Due to pricing changes it is a bit cheaper for me to get new more powerful VPS for cheaper than I have now. So I was manually moving and setting up stuff on this new VPS for last few days. It is nice to be free from all the dependencies required by Jenkins. I still want to configure some stuff on the server to have more fun, but it can wait for a while.

I also got scraped by Amazon bot and due to that I consider blocking all those bots by IP when it is known from where they operate.

SSH

In the past I used fail2ban to block weird IPs from accessing the server and trying to brute force into it, but due to some updates either in SSH or somewhere in the chain it stopped working properly. So I disabled it and I now use just SSH with some delay after failed attempt to login. Well, it is mostly to block the weird traffic since the SSH daemon is configured to login only with shh keys, no password access is allowed, so brute forcing this is truly a matter of luck.

Blog

The lack of posts is caused by my incompetence. I wanted to write an article about my little script which I made by I did not manage to come up with a good enough draft to turn into a blog post. And other ideas and stuff are also a bit limited and I was low on energy this whole year.

Falkon reports

I did not write the progress reports since I tried to work on stuff instead. Other thing is that Falkon website which is now also based on Hugo with KDE theme is very bad when it comes to long term support. It requires care and with my frequency of posts I am afraid that after each post I will need to update the KDE theme to match Hugo stuff and work properly. On other note, there is a nice collection of commits for Falkon which was merged in this year.

Conclusion

This year is crazy from many aspects and all I can say while not getting violent is a quote from Kirito from Sword Art Online Abridged:

“You know something? I really hate people! They’re selfish, ignorant, loud obnoxious pricks, with basically no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I mean really, look at all they’ve achieved! Genocide, global warming, reality TV, and just a never ending parade of failures and fuck ups! They are, without question, a complete write-off of a species, and how dare you make me care about them!”