My family and I have moved to from South Africa to England.
I nearly died last year, it first started with a burst appendix.
I was hospitalised for about a week, then sent home where I continued to have night-sweats.
After about a month I went back into hospital, where I was found to have abcesses on my liver.
This wasn't dealt with particularly well, and I subsequently developed sepsis and was put into ICU.
I was in hospital for over a month and lost 20kg, eventually discharged and now well again sadly regained all the weight,
but as a side-effect of the blood thinners that I was on have continued to abstain from alcohol for about five months now.
So why do I think it's a good idea to blog about things ... right now it's so that I can record for myself my minor accomplishments and things that I've learned.
In the last week or so, I've earned a lot more about networking infrastructure than I had ever expected to.
The learning experience was driven by the simple sounding task of self hosting a website and an instance of openvpn.
There are so many fiddly bits that all need to be configured just right or else it doesn't work.
- create an A record on dns for the host name point it to the public IP address my router
- Find my public ip address using this command :)
curl wtfismyip.com - create a static ip address on my router for my laptop using the mac address
- create a virtual host on the router for ports 80 and 443 from the public IP to my static IP
- set my home wifi network on my laptop as private, not public ... firewall blocks incoming traffic on public network
The rest of the stack is working nicely:
- docker-compose
- alpine/git : to fetch the website contents from a github private repo using a PAT
- nginx : http only to serve the --webroot challenge from certbot for initial certificate generation
- nginx : with https to serve the website content
- certbot/certbot : to generate TLS certs from letsencrypt.org
The script for this container generates the initial certificate to a shared volume and then loops every 12 hours to check for renewals.
When a cert is renewed a marker file is created which will be picked up by a background process in the nginx (ssl) container to restart the nginx workers.
