I found BashWrite which is just a very simple static site generator written completely in bash as a single file script.

The only dependency is having an up-to-date sed command which most systems should have. I use Alpine Linux which comes with a minimal sed command so I had to download the full command through my package manager.

It’s simple, basic and has support for the majority of markdown formatting. There’s some limitations due to it being written in Bash only but I am personally okay with that.

I found it on this list of static site generators if you’re curious to see more options.

It looks interesting and seems like it would be easy to set up. I’ll play with it and see how I like it. Thanks for the suggestion

Since my logs barely move, I just made aliases to where the logs are so it’s quick display and scan them within the terminal. I’m basically just viewing the system logs, fail2ban log and Caddy’s log so it’s fairly quick and simple for me.

The only change I’d like to do is change the output of Caddy’s log file so it’s not a long single line of information per output. I’ll have to do a bit more reading on that so I know what information I want to keep and how I want to visually organize it. At least for the moment, I am familiarising myself with what I am looking at and am slowly figuring out what information is relevant to me.

I like to keep my systems as simple and lean as possible which seems to strongly reflect my general approach to life. I find that kind of interesting.

I feel like my little Pi server is set up nicely now. At least I’m at the point where I’m not concerned about technically maintaining it. It’s as secure as I want it to be and I’ve tweaked my maintenance scripts slightly to avoid any unexpected issues.

I tried installing snikket but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work with my Caddyfile using my current wildcard domain cert configuration. I’ll try again another time when I’m motivated again. It’s a low priority to me.

The last changes I made were adding logs and making them accessible to myself. So far they are all boring and predictable. Which is good news. It’s also nice to see that I’m the only person accessing it. The bots haven’t found my little corner of the internet yet.

Right now I’m taking a break from self-hosted stuff to work on my gardens and two artsy projects. A wooden carving for a friend’s birthday and an overly complicated shell script that has no real purpose. Although I’ve learned lots from it already so it’s not a complete waste of time.

My immediate family still can’t understand that I’m just doing things. There’s no plan of action. Just a vague sense of a direction of where I want to go. If an opportunity comes up, I take it and hope it gets me closer to where I want to be.

Whenever I plan a trip, I usually plan how I get there, a few nights of somewhere to stay and plan to get back home. Whatever happens between my few nights at an accommodation and the return trip home is mystery to everyone including myself. Some of those trips have lasted months or years.

I’ve survived this far in life with no idea what I’m doing and still people get angry at me for not knowing what I’m doing. This has been me my entire life. I’m confused why they are so offended when I say “I don’t know.”

Apparently I’m supposed to know why I ate entire bag of chocolate chips. I don’t know, it just happened and I’m just as surprised as you are.

I use rsync too. It’s older and from what I understand was designed at a time when data storage was much smaller so it may not be as fast as other backup options. It also doesn’t have encrypted backups like other backup options (I think).

Rsync has been the most reliable option for me though. Every syncing option I’ve tried seems too complicated and breaks down every time I look away. Since my entire backup size is around 550gb and I’m not concerned with encrypted backups, I think rsync just works just fine.

I even created my own tool that puts my rsync commands into easy to read/modify files so I can organize my most common transfers. I can easily backup my phone, HomeAssistant server, home server and computer to my two backup locations in a single alias or cronjob now.

A bit of a pain to learning how to make proper backups that restore successfully every time, but once I figured it out, I’ve been very confident in my backup strategy.

Whenever I think about the movie Children of Men, all I can think is that the answer to the Human Project’s question was microplastics.

Instead of asking why women couldn’t have children anymore, they should have been checking men for forever confetti in their balls.

I’ve had a lifetime of people labeling me as something and trying to enforce that label on me. When I eventually do something that sits outside of that label, those same people get angry at me for breaking the expectations that they set for me. Expectations that they never explicitly told me but assumed because of that label they placed on me.

As a result, I pushed back by “delabelling” myself, mostly. If I must label myself, I attempt to use the most broad term possible as to avoid cornering myself. Sometimes it’s too easy to use a label as a conversational shortcut.

As a personal result, I tend to avoid labeling others. In my mind that puts me on even level with the people around me. It avoids me talking to specific groups of people and allows others to participate in the discussion, no matter how those other people view or identify themselves.

I’ve watched how words, labels and categorizations have become weaponized and used to divide people. Which is absurdity. Words are ever evolving and dying so to me it seems pointless to allow words to strongly influence me.

These days I surround myself with people who are able to show me who they are over people who spend their energy telling me who they are. Real confidence doesn’t need to waste their time on only words. Those words should add to that person as a whole. That’s how I want to view another person.

Not trying to convince you to change your mind, I do see the value in using words or labels to find community, especially in times like these. I think you seem open to at least seeing where my unorthodox views come from.

I tend to ignore terms like neurotypical and neurodiverse because I just view everyone as neurodiverse. And if everyone is neurodiverse, then nobody is neurodiverse. That just means to me that people are people. Some more insecure than others.

I also think that everyone is gay. Which means I personally don’t really view anyone as gay, just people doing normal people things no matter who they love. Some people just happen to be insecure as fuck about loving another person.

What I do see are a lot of insecure people attempting to set and enforce normal behaviour because they are afraid of being weird while ignoring the fact that being alive is the most weird and pointless experience ever.

Gotta have a little fun with the weird, pointlessness of existence, that’s what can make life beautiful and interesting :)

I was just having some fun by pointing out that women aren’t the only mythical creature whose signals are hard to read.

I do agree with your last point thoroughly, bullshitters do be bullshittin’ it. A lot. Too much I would say.

I’m autistic as fuck so I can’t read anyone’s signals but men are just as bad. I could never understand why men worked so hard to get my attention and got all weird when I didn’t give them that attention.

They also spend a lot of time trying to shape me into the type of man they want to be around yet they would never outright say what they are doing and why I should change for them.

Then they would get all jealous when I actually hung out with women and get even weirder about it when I wouldn’t engage them in the weird conversations they wanted to have about women.

Like dude, if you want a hug or a cuddle, just say so because these roundabout games you’re playing is confusing as fuck.

So now I wander the earth thoroughly confused…

podman ps shows the following:

CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                                 COMMAND               CREATED         STATUS         PORTS                                                         NAMES
daae60bdcc65  docker.io/library/caddy-caddy:latest  caddy run --confi...  47 minutes ago  Up 47 minutes  0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp, 0.0.0.0:5050->443/tcp, 2019/tcp, 443/udp  caddy

netstat -tunpl shows the following:

Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name    
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:5025            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      3270/sshd: /usr/sbi 
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:5050            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      7342/conmon         
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      7342/conmon         
tcp        0      0 10.89.0.1:53            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      7336/aardvark-dns   
tcp6       0      0 :::5025                 :::*                    LISTEN      3270/sshd: /usr/sbi 
udp        0      0 10.89.0.1:53            0.0.0.0:*                           7336/aardvark-dns 

The only difference for the netstat command between Docker and Podman is that Podman show’s entries for aardvark-dns and Docker does not which is something I expect.

I finally got Caddy’s TLS working with a custom module to handle DNS challenges. Turns out all I had to do was wait 10-15 minutes and everything would sort itself out.

Now on to the next puzzle. I started with Caddy in a Docker container and it’s working as intended. Now I want to replicate that in Rootful Podman Compose but I’m running into an issue. With the exact same setup (docker-compose.yml, Dockerfile and Caddyfile) I can get my TLS cert without issue but I can’t seem to connect to my website from any external browser. Not through my domain name or even through my home’s local network.

Once I figure out how I can access my website, I’ll be one step closer to where I want to be. Next will be to get Rootless Podman working, then I can finally set up the file server and kiwix instance instead of the test page I am currently using.

After that, I can finally spend time doing what I want to do and focus my time looking into the Gemeni Protocol.

Down the road I’ll look into hosting an IRC server and Snikket instant messenger but that’s super low priority. I like tinkering with my Raspberry Pi and my constant backup/restores wouldn’t be good for reliability for such services.

I sat down and managed to get wildcard certs working.

I figured I would leave my Caddyfile here in case anyone in the future needs a working reference. This is based off the Caddyfile mentioned in the original post.

Caddy Reference

# GLOBAL ENCRYPTION - DESEC.IO
{
        acme_dns desec {
                token "DeSEC.io Token Number"
        }
}

*.samplesite.ca {
        # SITE WIDE ENCRYPTION
        tls {
                dns desec {
                        token "DeSEC.io Token Number"
                }
        }
        # SUB DOMAIN #1
        @files host files.samplesite.ca
        handle @files {
                root * /srv
                file_server {
                        hide misc
                        browse
                }
        }
        # FALLBACK FOR UNHANDLED DOMAINS
        handle {
                abort
        }
}

Thanks for sharing that.

It’s nice to get extra context, it helps me understand how I can protect my devices and myself a bit better as I learn more about self hosting.

Oh no, I was just about to move forward and then you gave me another rabbit hole.

I didn’t know Let’s Encrypt had a public database, that does sound like a good idea to use wildcard certs instead.

I assume this is what I can use as a reference for wildcard certs.

How do you keep track of probing? I’ve been curious about that but haven’t put much effort into that as I’ve been focused on getting things working.

I think my confusion came from starting with NPM. The process took less than 2 minutes and everything worked as intended as soon as it was successful. That set me up with high expectations.

With Caddy, it kept adding multiple entries to the TXT record and reporting that the records didn’t match.

I think NPM uses certbot under the hood and I wasn’t sure if Caddy used something different (certmagic maybe?) since I had to build Caddy with a custom module.

In any case, it works and I now know I just have to wait a little longer.

That worked. I can finally see the padlock that says Verified by Let’s Encrypt.

I can’t believe all I had to do was wait. Thanks so much for sharing your experience.

I was considering a single user instance but I noticed just how much data was being transferred throughout the day and decided against it.

I’m drawn to IRC and Gemeni because it seems to use far less data. I’ve lately been into lowering my electrical power usage while still being able to use the internet. That also includes the type of programs my computer and devices use.

Practical or not, it’s been an interesting hobby for myself to learn.

It will only be for a select number of people I know and am comfortable with being there. This is going to be hosted on a Raspberry Pi so it’s not going to be set up for a large number of people.

I don’t want to moderate images or videos which is my main concern when it comes to moderation.

I read the experiences of moderators from the initial CSAM attack on Lemmy and that was already discouraging. I also spent time in PieFed’s matrix channel and hearing the additional tools being requested made me realize I just don’t want to deal with that at all.