Sometime last summer, around the time we renewed our lease, our landlord mentioned that he wanted to sell the house we've been renting in California for the past couple of years. As one might expect, this caused a bit of a stir at home, but then we didn't hear back from him for a couple of months (no news is good news, right?) and went back to life as normal. Around Yule we all but forgot about it.
Last weekend, our landlord paid us a visit and informed us that he was starting the house-selling process. The first round of …
UPDATE: 20191229 - Added how to rotate out the oldest backups.
As frequent readers may or may not remember, I rebuilt my primary server last year, and in the process set up a fairly hefty RAID-5 array (24 terabytes) to store data. As one might reasonably expect, backing all of that stuff up is fairly difficult. I'd need to buy enough external hard drives to fit a copy of everything on there, plus extra space to store [incremental backups]((https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_backup) for some length of time. Another problem is that both Leandra and the backup drives would …
Let's say there's a website that you want to make a local mirror of. This means that you can refer to it offline, and you can make offline backups of it for archival. Let's further state that you have access to some server someplace with enough disk space to hold the copy, and that you can start a task, disconnect, and let it run to completion some time later, with GNU screen for example. Let's further state that you want the local copy of the site to not be broken when you load it in a browser; all the links …
A couple of weeks back, somebody I know asked me how I went about deploying SSL certificates from the Let's Encrypt project across all of my stuff. Without going into too much detail about what SSL and TLS are (but here's a good introduction to them), the Let's Encrypt project will issue SSL certificates to anyone who wants one, provided that they can prove somehow that they control what they're cutting a certificate for. You can't use Let's Encrypt to generate a certificate for google.com because they'd try to communicate with the server (there isn't any such thing but …
It's now 2018. Don't ask me how we made it, but we did.
Regular readers have probably been wondering what's been going on that I haven't posted much. The short form, and the honest answer, is that I haven't had it in me to really post, aside from some stuff that I copy-and-pasted out of my notes, polished up a bit, and saved. The holiday season is always a busy time, and my life is no different from anyone else's in that regard.
Lyssa and I flew back to Pennsylvania at more or less the last minute about halfway through …
I know I haven't posted much this month. The holiday season is in full effect and life, as I'm sure you know, has been crazy. I wanted to take the time to throw a quick tip up that I just found out about which, if nothing else, will make it easier to get up and running on a Raspberry Pi that you've received as a gift. Here's the situation:
You have a new account on a machine that you want to SSH into easily. So, you want to quickly and easily transfer over one or more of your SSH public …
As you may or may not be aware, I've been a customer of Dreamhost for many years now (if you want to give them a try, here's my referral link). Both professionally and personally, I've been hosting stuff with them without many complaints (their grousing about my websites being too large is entirely reasonable given that I'm on their shared hosting plan). Something always got me about their SSL support, though, was that you had to buy a unique IP address from them if you wanted to use it. That cost a pretty penny, almost as much as I pay …
