server farm sus

The saga of this server move is almost never ending, almost. I bet you’re sick of seeing these posts federating out, but also glad that they’re not junk or off of a russian speaking Twitter feed.

Anyhoo, this morning I put a little effort in to trying to offset the lag for most, if not all, people visiting blog.sus.fr and some of the bandwidth issues I seem to be having sat here at home.

One of the former projects I had was Geographical Points of Presence using Geographic DNS which I’m still paying for using at OM.Gay. It clicked that, potentially, I could use what I learned there on the new incarnation, which to be fair is now super outdated by what I just did.

I looked at my options and tried to recreate what I already have a subscription for, got frustrated, may or may not have cried, then remembered that CNAME is a thing and oddly enough if I made blog.sus.fr CNAME to a record on om.gay then that domain would do the whole geographically ideal response.

I looked at myself in the mirror and I demanded to know who in this room was the IT smart person, because it wasn’t who I was looking at 🫠

After berating myself for not knowing the basics of a DNS Zone file and how the internet has basically worked since forever, I got to work.

Using the existing VPSes that tunnel OM.Gay, I setup the ProxyPass, but also took the time to throw in some of the redirects to reduce the proxy requests to the home server. I also made sure to make to exact same mistake I did when I rebooted the server here 🫡

Watched the logs for a bit and we were back on track, ironically, at the same time that Fediverse Observer came over to check the place out and now it thinks the server is based in Ashburn, Virginia, United States.

Not content with leaving a couple of big holes on the planetary coverage and always one for a good deal, this afternoon I took DigitalOcean up on their free credit offer. Let me tell you that is generous, but I’ve gone for the cheapest options possible to do my thing with.

I started off with starting a small droplet up in India, since that’s the closest I can get to the entire African continent. I’m really hoping that the connections between India and most African nations is decent, but also on the other hand there is a lot of connections that come through India / Pakistan that I could do with not having. I may also redirect other countries on to this server for various reasons.

Of course, DigitalOcean assigned my instance a pretty toxic IP address and I had to do some leg work there.

It took me about an hour or so to get it running and taking traffic, which is wonderful.

But I was not done here, oh no dear reader, I did the same thing and now I have redirected traffic down under to a server in Sydney 🇦🇺. You’re welcome.