published on May 09 2023
For the past 3 weeks, the server which this site, waffelo.net, drgnz.club and its subservices have been hosted has been slowly reinstalled, and some services that we host have been completely reinstalled. For example, matrix server bidzan.net no longer exists, since it was hosted on conduit it was half-disfunctional and therefore we've moved to synapse. The same goes for PeerTube and git instance. The reason for reinstalling git was complete transition from sqlite database to a more mature postgresql databse, which everyhting else runs on anyway. The server has been reinstalled from ubuntu to Gentoo Linux, because ubuntu is sometimes rather frustrating to deal with. Not only gentoo has superior packaging, but in my opinion it's also more stable, and you have more freedom over what you can do with the system. With gentoo and its system of ebuilds, we're also not reliant on gentoo.org when installing software. gentoo.org could go down for a week and we probably wouldn't notice since portage (its package manage) pulls source code directly from the developper's website or git instance.
This also means that it is very easy to write custom ebuilds for software that's not in the official or unofficial repositories. That being said, though gentoo has a lot of advantages, it has a big disadvantage and that is often long compile times. Since gentoo is a source-based distro, packages are compiled and installed locally. That leads us to another big change which I will discuss in this article.
The server currently runs on a poor old AMD Phenom CPU, presumably from 2013 or 2014. Now, this cpu is quite decent, it wouldn't be a problem on a binary-based distro, but on a souce-based distro CPU speed is quite important. We could also use a better server CPU for, say, editing videos and other CPU intensive tasks like that. The biggest issue though isn't the CPU, it's actually memory. We have 8 gigs of RAM in this server, and thats completely fine for a desktop computer which it originally was, but it's not enough for a high-demand server. We will likely upgrade to a modern AMD ryzen CPU and 32 or 64 gigabytes of RAM. We might also upgrade to a Samsung NVMe SSD. The upgrade will likely happen in summer or earlier.
Enough about hardware, let's talk about what else changed on the server. Since there are basically two owners of the server, me and waffelo, we've decided that it would be better to have one unified domain, instead of having stuff scattered arround waffelo.net and bidzan.net. So we've decided to buy the drgnz.club domain. This means that many services are no longer on waffelo.net or bidzan.net, but on drgnz.club. A list of these services can be found on the root website. The only service that is still on waffelo.net is git.waffelo.net as of writing this.
Also, a new akkoma fediverse instance has been started. It's on socia.drgnz.club. It's quite easy to set up on gentoo and akkoma even has official guide for gentoo. Shall I say, based?
As of writing this, E-mail server and searx instance don't yet work. E-mail is a dinosaur of a protocol and it's hard to set up, I've not yet figured it out. I also didn't manage to get searx up and running because I can't for Christ's sake figure out how to use uwsgi, which searx depends on. Since debian or ubuntu basically does this for you, searx docummentation isn't very speciffic on how to do so.