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Thanks to Herculean effort from @Zoe O'Connell, our little #friendica server has dealt with the backlog of my post about GRA reform going viral (Friendica is REALLY bad at that) and then the cheap PoS SSD I bought failing half way through.

The offending piece of crap is pictured after I disassembled it. Even when working it was only as fast as an SD card. Truly dreadful.

Anyway, the friendica server is temporarily running in a data centre in Madrid (apparently it’s that easy to move Docker containers), but because the URL is fixed for all time when you create a server, the little Pi is sitting there acting as a concierge for that VPS and sending all data to it via an SSH tunnel. String and sellotape, whatever.

I have bought it a shiny proper branded SSD from Samsung that goes like shit off a Teflon coated shovel and we will likely be migrating it back this weekend.

Lesson learned: you CAN host a personal instance on an RPi on your home network, but please, for the love of god, do not buy the cheapest piece of shit SSD you can find. You will regret it if you do.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Nah, it’s nothing as fancy as an SSH tunnel. Just an iptables SNAT/DNAT. It’s all HTTPS anyway.

One reason I suck an nginx proxy in front of it was so I could force redirects of HTTP without fiddling with it’s own Apace instance.

Also because certbot.

in reply to Sarah Brown

zoe@friendica:~$ sudo du -sh mysql nginx friendica
865M	mysql
160K	nginx
155M	friendica
zoe@friendica:~$ docker image ls
REPOSITORY                 TAG         IMAGE ID     CREATED      SIZE
friendica                  latest      7e3551926c66 43 hours ago 652MB
yobasystems/alpine-mariadb latest      0e44a1aef456 6 weeks ago  238MB
nginx                      1.15-alpine dd025cdfe837 3 years ago  16.1MB
zoe@friendica:~$ 

I'm guessing for anyone on Mastodon that looks hopelessly mangled but should make some sense on Friendica. Also, I have no idea why I pulled such an old Nginx image. I should fix that.

in reply to Zoe O'Connell

Oh, they’re tiny! Up for migrating back tonight, or wanna leave it a bit?
in reply to Sarah Brown

I need to prep for a mooting competition tonight. Saturday evening is the next time I have some free time...
in reply to Zoe O'Connell

No hurry. Only if you feel like it. How long do we have on the Madrid VPS?
in reply to Sarah Brown

Depends how long I'm willing to pay for it. (Turns out I couldn't use the free tier, I think I must have already used it up)

Yesterday cost me the grand total of £1.21. That'll go down because I'll bump the size down later on now it's caught up.

in reply to Zoe O'Connell

OK. All I need to do from this end is clone the SD card onto the new SSD, and then resize the filesystem. Let me know when and I'm all yours.

In fact, if you're willing to redo your iptables magic, I can do it now

in reply to Sarah Brown

The existing SD card knows nothing about Friendica or anything else, including permanent iptables rules. All it's had is a sudo apt-get install tshark for some initial troubleshooting.

Might as well put a fresh install on the new SSD if you have a spare Pi.

in reply to Zoe O'Connell

But then I have to go delete shit in my .ssh/known_hosts files AGAIN
in reply to Sarah Brown

Don't knock gaffer tape solutions. They're holding the best parts of the internet together.