Note: In this post I mention some problems and ask questions (to myself, like thinking aloud ). The goal is not to get answers to those questions (I suppose that I will find them soon or later in the internet, manuals and so), but to show the kind of problems and questions that arise in my selfhosting adventures, which I suppose are common to other people trying to administer a home server with some web services.
Am I an
userop? Well I m something in the middle of (GNU/Linux) user and sysadmin: I have studied computer technical engineering but most of my experience has been in helpdesk, providing support for Windows users. I m running Debian in some LAMP boxes at work (without GUI) since 2008 or so, and in my desktops (with GUI) since 2010. I don t code nor package, but I don t mind trying to read code and understand it (or not). I know a bit of C, a bit of Python, of PHP, and enough Perl to open a Perl file and close it after two minutes, understanding that it s great, but too much for me
:) I translate software, so I m not scared to clone a repository, edit files, commit or submit a patch. I m not scared of compiling a program (except if it s an Android app: I try to avoid setting up the development environment just to try some translation that I made but I built my Puma before it was the binary available for download or in F-Droid).
In conclusion, I feel more like a GNU/Linux power user than a sysadmin . Sometimes just a user or even a newbie (for example, I don t know very well the Unix/Linux folder tree where are the wallpapers stored? Does it depend on the desktop that I use?).
Anyway. I won t stop my free software + free networks digital life because I don t know many things. I bought a small server for home last September, and I wanted to try to selfhost some services, for me and for my family. I want to be a home sysadmin or something like that, so I joined the
userops mailing list :)
Here you have my experiences on selfhosting/being an userop until now.
Mail
I even didn t try to setup my mail server, because many people say it s a pain (although nice articles were published about how to do it, for example
this series in ArsTechnica) and I need a static IP which is 14 /month more to my ISP, and
Gandi, the place where I rented my domain name, provides mail, and they use Debian and Roundcube, and sponsor Debian too, so I decided to trust on them.
So this is my strategy now, to try to keep mail under my control:
- Trust my domain provider.
- Backup my mail and keep local copies, removing sensible stuff from the server.
- Use and spread the word about GPG encryption.
- Try not to send photos or videos by mail, just send the link to my MediaGoblin instance (see below).
MediaGoblin
I ve setup two
MediaGoblin instances (yes, two!). I managed to do it in Debian 7 stable (I think NodeJS npm was not needed then), but soon later I upgraded to Jessie so now it s even better.
I installed Nginx and PostgreSQL via apt, to use them for both instances (and probably some more software later).
One instance is public, and I use a Debian user, a PostgreSQL database, and it s running in
http://media.larjona.net
I have requested an SSL cert to Gandi but I still didn t deployed it (lazy LArjona!!).
The other instance is private, for family photos. I didn t know very well how much of my existing setup could reuse and how to keep both instances in case of downtimes or attack I know more or less the concept or chroot but I don t know how to deploy it in my machine. So I decided to use another Debian user, another PostgreSQL database, deploy MediaGoblin in a different folder, and create another virtual server in my Nginx to serve it. I managed to setup that virtual server to http-authenticate and to serve content via a different port, and use a self-signed SSL certificate (it s only for family, so it does not matter). I created another (unprivileged) Debian user with a password for the nginx authentication, and gave my family the URL in the form
https://mediaprivate.larjona.net:PortNumber and the user and password (
mediaprivate is a string, and
PortNumber is a number). I think they don t use the instance too much, but at least I upload photos there from time to time and email the link instead of emailing the photos themselves (they don t use GPG either ).
Upgrades
I upgraded MediaGoblin from 0.7.1 to 0.8.0 successfully,
I sent a report about how I did it to the mailing list. First I upgraded the public instance, when I figure out the process, I upgraded the second instance to test my instructions, and then, I sent the report with the instructions to the mailing list.
Static site and LimeSurvey: the power of free software (with instructions)
I wanted to act as a mirror of
floss2013.libresoft.es and
surveys.libresoft.es since they suffer a downtime and I participated in that project (not in the sysadmin part, but in the research and content creation).
The static site floss2013.libresoft.es offered a zip with the whole website tree (since the website was licensed as AGPL), and I had access to the git repo holding the development copy of the website. So I just cloned the repository and setup another nginx virtual server in my machine, and tuned my DNS zone in Gandi website to serve
floss2013.larjona.net from home. 10 minutes setup YAY! #inGitWeTrust #FreeSoftwareFTW
:)
For
surveys.larjona.net I had to install a LimeSurvey instance. I knew how to do it because we use LimeSurvey at work, but at home I had Nginx instead of Apache, and PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. And no PHP I searched about how to install PHP in Nginx (I can use apt-get, nice!) and how to install LimeSurvey with Nginx and PostgreSQL (I had documentation about that, so I followed, and it worked).
For making available the data (one survey and its results, so people can login as visitor to query and get statistics), I downloaded the LimeSurvey export dataset that we were providing in the static website, followed the
replication instructions (hey, I wrote them!), and they worked #oleole! (
And here, dear researchers, gets demonstrated that free software and free culture really empower your research and help spreading your results).
Etherpad: not so easy, it seems!
I m trying to install Etherpad-Lite, but I m suffering a bit. I think I did everything ok according to some guides but I get Bad Gateway and these kind of errors when trying to browse with Lynx in the host:
[error] 3615#0: *24 upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out)
while reading response header from upstream,
client: 127.0.0.1,
server: pad.larjona.net,
request: "GET / HTTP/1.0",
upstream: "http://127.0.0.1:9001/",
host: "pad.larjona.net"
2015/04/17 20:52:56 [error] 3615#0: *24 connect() failed
(111: Connection refused) while connecting to upstream,
client: 127.0.0.1,
server: pad.larjona.net,
request: "GET / HTTP/1.0",
upstream: "http://[::1]:9001/",
host: "pad.larjona.net"
I m not sure if I need to open some port in iptables, my router, or change my nginx configuration because the guides assume you re only serving one website in the port 80 (and I have several of them, now ), or what I ve spent three chunks of time (maybe ~2h each?) on this, in different days, and couldn t figure it out, so I decided to round-robin in my TODO list.
Userops thoughts
Debian brings peace of mind (for me)
On one side, maintaining a Debian box it s quite easy, and the more software that it s packaged, the less time that I spend installing or upgrading. I like being in stable, I m in Jessie now (I migrated when it was frozen), but I ll stay in stable as much as I can.
I like that I can use the software that I installed via apt-get for several services (nginx, PostgreSQL ). About the software that is not packaged (MediaGoblin, LimeSurvey, EtherPad, maybe others later), I wonder how dependencies and updates are handled. And maybe (probably) I have installed some components several times, one for each service (this sounds like a Windows box #grr).
For example MediaGoblin uses PyPump. PyPump 0.5 is packaged in Debian Jessie. MediaGoblin uses PyPump 0.7+. What if PyPump 0.7+ gets, let s say, into Jessie-backports? Can I benefit from that?
I know that MediaGoblin upgrade instructions includes upgrading the dependencies, but what about some security patch in one dependency? Should I upgrade the pip modules periodically? How to know if some upgrade is recommended because patches a vulnerability, or it s just new features (and maybe breaking my setup)?
This kind of things are the peace of mind that Debian packaging brings to me: when some piece of software is packaged, I know maybe I need to care about proper setup and configuration, but later, it s kind-of-easy to maintain (since the Debian maintainers care about the rest). I don t mind about cloning a repo and compiling, I mind about later, or coexistance with other program/services. I trust in the MediaGoblin community and I m an active member (I m not developer, but hang on IRC, follow the mailing list, etc) but for example I don t know anything about the EtherPad project. And I don t feel like joining the community (I m already an active member in Debian, MediaGoblin, F-Droid, Pump.io, translator of LimeSurvey and many other small apps that I use, and in the future will use more services, like OwnCloud, XMPP ), joining the community of each software that I use is becoming not sustainable :s
Free software is more than software
I follow the userop mailing list, and it s becoming very technical. I mostly understand the problems (which are similar to the problems that I face: how to isolate different services, how to easily-configure them, how to make them installable by average user ) But I don t understand most of the solutions proposed, and I think that probably we need technical solutions, but in the meanwhile, some issues can be addressed not with software, but with other means: good documentation, community support, translations, beta-testers
This is my conclusion until now. When a project is well documented, I think I can find my way to selfhost no matter if the software is packaged (or contained ) or not. MediaGoblin, and LimeSurvey, are well documented, and the user support channels are very responsive.
I find lots of instructions that assume that you will use a whole machine for their service (and not for other things). And lots of documentation for the LAMP stack, but not for Nginx + PostgreSQL and Node instead of PHP So, for each particularity of my setup, I search the internet and try to pick good sources to help me do what I wanted to do.
I m kind of privileged
Some elements, not software related, to take into account as pre-requisites for succeed selfhosting services:
- I knew what to search.
- I knew which sites to visit from the results (arch wiki, debian wiki, stack overflow, etc: some of them were not the Top1 in the results).
- I had time to read several sources and make my mind about what to do and how.
- I can read, understand, and write in English.
- I have no fear about my broken English.
- I have no impostor syndrome.
- I felt welcome in the FLOSS communities where I hanged out.
These aspects are not present in a lot of people. If I look around to the computer users that I know (mostly Windows+Android, some GNU/Linux users, some Mac OSX users, some iOS users), I find that they search things like X does not work or they cannot write a proper search query in English. Or they trust some random person writing a recipe in their blog, without trying first to understand what the recipe does. Other people just say I m not a professional sysadmin, I ll just do what everybody does (aka use Google services or whatever). What if I try and I don t succeed? . Things like that.
We may need some technical solutions (and hackers are thinking about that, and working on that). But I feel that we need (more) a huge group of beta-testers, dogfooding people, aventurers that try the half-cooked solutions and provide successful and unsuccessful experiences, to guide the research and make software technologies advance. I m not sure if I am an userop, but I feel part of that vanguard force , I want to be part of the future of free software and free networks.
Comments?
You can comment about this post on
this pump.io thread.Filed under:
My experiences and opinion Tagged:
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About a decade ago, I played in the (now defunct) "Jozef Pauly
ensemble", a flute choir connected to the musical academy where I was
taught to play the flute. At the time, this ensemble had the habit of
goin on summer trips every year; sometimes these trips were large
international concert tours (like our 2001 trip to Australia), but that
wasn't always the case; there have also been smaller trips, like the
2002 one to the French Ardennes.
While there, we went on a day trip to the city of Reims. As a city close
to the front in the first world war, it has a museum dedicated to that
subject that I remembered going to. But the fondest memory of that day
was going to a park where a podium was set up, with a few stacks of
fold-up chairs standing nearby. I took one and listened to the music.
That was the day when I realized that I kindof like jazz. I had come
into contact with Jazz before, but it had always been something to be
used as a kind of musical wallpaper; something you put on, but don't
consciously listen to. Watching this woman sing, however, was a
different kind of experience altogether. I'm still very fond of her
rendition of "Besame Mucho".
After having listened to the concert for about two hours, they called it
quits, but did tell us that there was a record which you could buy. Of
course, after having enjoyed the afternoon so much, I couldn't imagine
not buying it, so that happened.
Fast forward several years, in the move from my apartment above my
then-office to my current apartment (just around the corner), the record
got put into the wrong box, and when I unpacked things again it got
lost; permanently, I thought. Since I also hadn't digitized it yet at
the time, I haven't listened to it anymore in quite a while.
But that time came to an end today. The record which I thought I'd lost
wasn't, it was just in a weird place, and while cleaning yesterday, I
found it sitting among a bunch of old stuff that I was going to throw
out. Putting on the record today made me realize again how good it
really is, and I thought that I might want to see if she was still
active, and if she might perhaps have made another album.
It was great to find out that not only had she made six more albums
since the one I bought, she'd also become a lot more known in the Jazz
world (which I must admit I don't really follow all that well), and won
a number of awards.
At the time, Youn Sun Nah was just a (fairly) recent graduate from a
particular Jazz school in Paris. Today, she appears to be so much
more...
only one week left until the jessie release. yay!
in the last weeks I didn't find many RC bugs that I could fix; still, here's
the short list; nice feature: I mostly help others or could build an work
done by others.
Yesterday, my first term started as the 
Today I upgraded my main web-host to the Jessie release of Debian GNU/Linux.
I performed the upgraded by changing wheezy to jessie in the sources.list file, then ran:
For these who similarily suffer from having to use Googlemail at work. If anyone else has more of these, please do share.
Deactivate the spamfilter
The site admins can do that. Otherwise, you will have work-relevant eMails, for example from your own OTRS system, end up in Spam (where you don t see it, as their IMAP sucks) and deleted without asking 30 days later. (AIUI, the only way to get eMails actually deleted from Google )
Do not use their SMTP service
Use your own outgoing MTA. This brings back the, well, not feature but should-have-been-granted-but-Google-doesn t-do-it-anyway that, when you write to a mailing list, you also get your own messages into your own INBOX.
Calendars
I have no solutions for this. I stopped using the Googlemail calendars because they didn t think it a problem that, when I accept an invitation in Kontact (KDEPIM as packaged in Debian sid), the organiser of the calendar item in the sender s calendar (for which I do not have write permissions) changes to me (so the actual meeting organiser cannot change anything afterwards) and/or calendar items get doubled. I now run a local uw-imapd (forward-ported to sid by means of a binNMU) for sent-mail folders etc. and a local iCalendar directory for calendars.
In a recent project of mine, a 
Sometimes one stumbles upon stuff that touches one deeply. Granted, the topic of the first video from the artist I want to present you now did touch me naturally. But it made me take a closer look. This is about 
After 
On Sunday I gave a talk about 
This was just meant to say hello to the Debian Planet readers, but I'll end it with a Jessie related question, so... Intro For those who don't know me, I was born in Betanzos, A Coru a, Galicia, in the North-West of Spain and I currently live on A Coru a. I've been a Debian developer since year 2000 when I was quite more involved than currently (live changes), but I'm always expecting to be able to dedicate more time to the project, I hope this will happen when my two children grow up a little bit. I had been wanting to send my blog's Debian related posts to the planet but always failed to do so, yesterday I found the planet wiki page and I said... it's so easy that I don't have any excuse not to do it, so here I am. Oh, BTW... if I ever comment on Debian's anniversary (16th of August) that at Betanzos we are launching 
The actual use of this extension is still in development and the log files are not currently publicly visible, but it may still be useful for people to know the what and why
The Debian ARMMP kernel can be used for multiple devices, just changing the DTB. I ve already done tests with this for Cubietruck and Beaglebone-Black, iMX.53 was one of the original test devices too. Whilst these tests can deploy a full image (there are examples of building such images in the