So I’m mostly done with the updates to GCW and related sites.
The basic structure is:
A DokuWiki instance at the root, mostly so I have a way to post links to content that I want to make visible publicly.
A WordPress instance (i.e. what you are currently reading) to hold the long running “News from Great Castle Wilson” (since 2005(!)) content.
A NextCloud instance, mostly being used as an internet accessible file server.
I’m sure there lot’s of rough edges still, and one glaring omission that is I have a *very* crappy backup strategy running. Nothing close to the elegant solution I had for my old site. Now if I could only remember how that worked…
Er… yes, I’m reworking the underlying structure of GCW again.
This is my most drastic update yet, and things are currently in a complete shambles. I’ll be switching the public face back to the old site when I’m not working it.
Lots of old content is currently not available on the new site, so if there’s something you need, let me know and I’ll get it for you.
I had pre-ordered a RPi 5 a couple of months ago, but really had no idea when it was going to show up, so it was a pleasant surprise when I got the email from PiShop earlier this week to say that it had arrived. A quick trip over to their warehouse on Colonnade Roadet voilà.
As you can see from the above picture, I also got the stock active cooler, but that was it. It’s actually mounted to the bottom panel of an old RPi 4 case I had lying around, just to keep it elevated off of the desk. Hopefully that will help to keep it cool, and reduce the chances of damage to the board.
Speaking of cooling, like many other RPi enthusiasts, I was surprised by how hot the wee beastie gets. I haven’t done a lot of testing yet, but just based on the CPU temp plugin in the taskbar, idle temp is around 38° C. As soon as you start doing anything (like typing a blog post) it rapidly goes up to around 48°C. Somewhere around this temperature the fan on the heat sink will spin up, but because it’s variable speed, even with it running there is next to no sound. The only time I’ve heard the fan spin at full speed is during boot up, and even then it’s still quite quiet — i.e. it’s not the screaming monster you might expect a fan that tiny to be. Regardless, the heat sink fins do get hot enough that you probably don’t want to touch them while it’s running.
I have been holding off upgrading my webserver Pi to the latest debian bookworm based OS, since there was no (official) upgrade path from the previous version and it’s a pain to move all of the hosted sites over to a new install. Now that I have a Pi 5 too, I think it may be time. The combination of more performant hardware and the move from PHP7 to PHP8 in bookworm should provide a significant boost. Note: I really don’t *need* to do this, the current sites load just fine, but a few pages (like the NextCloud dashboard) aren’t quite where I’d like them.
Anyway, I’ll post again once I have moved the server over to the new hardware. For now, I can say I’m very happy with it. If you’re looking for a super cheap, small form factor desktop, the RPi 5 will definitely work for you. It’s still not a speed demon, but it will play 1080p/60fps video without dropping a lot of frames, and feels quite snappy to use (running off an SSD). Peace!
If you’re reading this, then you know I have a home website, with some of my older music output and this blog. I also have a handful of other unpublicized properties (a wiki, a private cloud, etc.) running on the same hardware. Many of these have been up for a *long* time in internet years: The first Wayback Machine snapshot I could find was from 2006, but the first post on the blog is actually from March 2005.
Over the lifespan of the site, I have changed the hardware it’s hosted on several times from a Mac G5 tower, to a first generation Mac mini, to an iMac, to a 4Gig Raspberry Pi, and finally to its current home on an 8Gig Pi. I have also switched internet providers multiple times: Bell, Rogers, Bell, TekSavvy, and now back to Bell. The reason I’m on Bell again (instead of TekSavvy cable) is because they finally ran fibre-to-the-home out to my house, and so:
Fast!
I have been avoiding Bell for a while because OOTB Bell home internet service blocks incoming access to http, which makes any website you run at home inaccessible from the internet at large. Really, this is just a cash grab from Bell, since they will happily let the traffic through if you have a business account, at many times the cost. The truth is, I don’t run a business from my home, I just have a personal website that gets its traffic from family and a handful of friends.
What’s worse, Bell where I live doesn’t even want to admit they filter the incoming traffic. When I went through first and second level tech support, the people involved took forever to understand the question, then said that they were sure that nothing was filtered. After paying for “expert” Bell tech support and spending an hour getting them to understand what I was asking, the response was effectively “That’s just how we do it; there’s no way to change it”.
If anyone else hits a wall when attempting to get Bell to admit they filter traffic, here is a link that might be useful: https://www.bellmts.ca/support/internet/security/blocked-or-restricted-ports
Note that link is from a Manitoba Bell site, which means it’s not directly applicable where I am, but it is clear evidence that some parts of Bell do filter. In case, the page gets taken down, here’s the salient section:
Screenshot
Anyway, if Google brought you here, you probably want to know how I got the site internet visible again. The solution I found works, but is definitely a bit of a hack. What I did was tell the Bell modem to put my home router in the DMZ. This is perhaps not great security wise, but really it’s basically the same situation as when I was running on TekSavvy.
The next step was to tell my home router to connect via PPPoE. This gets the router its own connection to Bell, which bypasses the port blocking. To do this, you need your modem account and password. That information you can get from the “My Bell” website on the details page for your internet service. You can’t actually get your password (of course), but you can reset it to a new value and then use that.
Running a PPPoE connection is presumably costing me performance, but given that my internal wiring and switches are all gigabit (for now, at least!), I’m still getting close to the theoretical maximum to my machines. Here’s what I see on my home Mac:
And so all is right with the world again. 🙂 Note that there is still the added wrinkle that I need to run a DynDNS client to keep mikew.ca pointing at the PPPoE connection, but that’s not a new problem.
So, I realized my last post was probably a bit confusing. The reason I was seeing issues with my older posts was that I had moved them to a new WordPress install because, as it happens, I have once again moved GCW to a new machine. This time, it’s another Raspberry Pi, but this new install has a few nice things going for it:
It’s an 8Gig model. I don’t actually believe I need that much space to run a web server most of the time, but I am running quite a few web apps on it now, and depending on what was going on, I was seeing some peaks on the 4Gig one that were pushing into swap.
It’s a brand new, fresh install on SSD. The old one was still running off a MicroSD card, with the website content stored on a separate SSD. Although this gave me lots of storage for the website, it meant that the install was just that tiny bit more complex than a standard one, so I was forever fiddling with it when updating, etc.
It’s even smaller!I love the size of the finished result. Here’s a picture to give you the idea. Note the size of the ethernet jack on the side for scale.
This time around, I’ve only got 500Gig of storage for the whole install including the website, but I’m no where near hitting that limit yet, so I’m very happy.
Most of my older posts seem to have extended entries for the titles. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I suspect it’s a side-effect of one too many export/imports. Something to figure out eventually.
Update: I managed to turn it off by hiding post abstracts. I’m not sure why this suddenly started happening however. Hm…
I apparently have joined the big leagues, although it’s a bit too early to say for sure. The ping time isn’t great, but I guess it will be good enough. For comparison, here’s what I had before the upgrade:
Ping: 4ms
Down 47.5
Up: 10.4
I’ve tried GeForce Now and it’s like night and day. The game looks basically like it’s running locally now.
As you can see from this post, GCW transferred over seamlessly too.
I have set the blog to require registration before you can comment. Apologies. It’s an experiment to see if this will help me manage the egregious amounts of spam I’m getting (even with akismet’s help). If it doesn’t help I’ll turn it off again, but to give you some context, in 12 hours I received 17 pages of spam!