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Well, here I am making what I hope to be one last post in the series of getting this blog started. I just discovered that in order to have a public blog, you must have your instance setup as a multi-user instance. I only intend for this instance to be for me, and hence why I setup this instance as single-user in the first place. Now that I know it must be multi-user in order to go public, it is now multi-user. However, I will not be opening up registrations anytime soon.

At this current moment, however, it seems like my other posts haven't federated yet, even though they should. I'm hoping this post can federate to some extent. We'll see, but I hope that it does so automatically. Maybe the others take time too, I don't know.

Anyways, I'm getting tired. It's during the night that I'm writing this, so I'm going off to bed now. Until next time! :D

 
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from The Generic Blog

Recently, I just discovered that my blog was offline for a period of time. I finally figured out why: because I didn't save the custom service script for WriteFreely!

I also realized my router's firewall config for this blog wasn't very optimal, so I fixed that.

The blog should now be up and running now for good, until I take it down for whatever reason.

Now, in case if you want to see actual content, I have some drafts lined up, and I hope to get those out soon. They will take some time, but until then, you'll be stuck with these updates :P

Until next time! :D

 
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from The Generic Blog

On Saturday at midnight PDT, my server rebooted as a part of its weekly updates. When I woke up this morning (PDT), I saw that my blog was down. I was kind of expecting this, considering that there wasn't a service script and it wasn't set to automatically start on startup. When I launched WriteFreely manually, everything was back the way it was.

I've now written an OpenRC startup script for WriteFreely. If you want it for your own use, here it is:

#!/sbin/openrc-run

depend()
{
    need net
}

name="writefreely"
description="Manages WriteFreely"
command="/usr/bin/writefreely"
command_args="-c /etc/writefreely/config.ini"
command_background=true
pidfile="/run/${RC_SVCNAME}.pid"

output_log="/var/log/${RC_SVCNAME}.log"
error_log="/var/log/${RC_SVCNAME}-error.log"

This was mostly taken from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65942607/how-create-use-services-with-openrc, and I guess you can consider it a derivative of the answer's code. Thus, this little script is technically licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. Credits go to Guillermo Roche and William Desportes for the original answer.

Anyways, we're still standing, and we'll see where this blog takes us next! Until next time! :D

 
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from The Generic Blog

It seemed as if I were discussing about potentially setting up a blog, and after a bit of encouragement and a little bit of research later, here we are! Shoutout to Mark for the kind words of encouragement too! I'm not guaranteeing that this will last or anything, but it's a nice foray into something that I can try. It could end up like my private file server; I didn't quite expect to find myself using it as much as I do now, but it turns out that I rely on that for everyday use. Anyways, we'll see how it goes! :D

A Quick Word of Note

This isn't the first time I've set up a blog. During the pandemic, I set up a Blogger blog to discuss things, although that never materialized. Now, here we are, except I have complete control over my blog now.

Anyways, let's get to how I set this up.

A bit of how this instance is set up

This instance is ran on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ running whatever the latest stable version of Alpine Linux is. I have set up automatic updates via a cron script, and this happens every Saturday @ midnight pacific time. The update script was originally setup for updating my file server since I know I won't use it around that time. If you are reading the blog, however, then you should be 99% OK (unless you hit that 1% chance).

I like to use Alpine Linux on any personal servers I run because it's super lightweight. It's so lightweight that I've seen it use only ~60 MB of RAM when idle. Right now, it's using ~415 MB since OpenSSH, Syncthing, and WriteFreely are running. I could potentially cram another service in here, but that'd really be pushing in my opinion. Unless it's a really lightweight service of course.

Parting Words (For Now!)

Well, that's all I have for today. Maybe I'll post updates about Tenacity or any other project I work on in general. Maybe I'll post fun bits of information in an attempt to document things I wish I knew sooner. We'll see! For now, thank you for reading, and I hope to see you again soon! :D

 
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