• servers
• roberta

roberta

• debian bullseye (11.0) x64
• Vultr VPS Cloud Compute: 1x CPU, 1gb RAM, 25gb disk, $5/mon
• IPv6 is autoconfigured to a static address using the enp1s0 MAC address, good for DNS
• 20gb of block storage attached, because the OS disk is too small for my site content

  • Official docs/guides here: https://www.vultr.com/docs/block-storage/

  • attached as /dev/vdb

  • formatted as GPT, single partition, ext4 filesystem, mounted at /data

    UUID=def88a1b-85e9-461b-8833-ef1356de02fb   /data   ext4   defaults,noatime,nofail   0 0

what she hosts

• caddy, TLS frontend for:
  • blog.meidokon.net
  • astcd2.meidokon.net
  • mikanya.meidokon.net
  • despair.meidokon.net, despairfiles.meidokon.net
  • kesakoi.meidokon.net
  • caress.airtv.org, zalas.meidokon.net
  • 765.agency
  • tallgirls.info (expired domain)
    • bismrk.tallgirls.info
  • roberta.meidokon.net
  • furinkan.meidokon.net
  • moin.meidokon.net
  • wiki.meidokon.net
• docker
  • meidokon-moin
• php-fpm for the websites
  • astcd2
  • blog
• MariaDB for the websites
  • blog
  • despairworks_prod
  • mikanya_prod

build process

• Deploy it, collect SSH hostkeys, login as root using your existing SSH key.
• Record IP addresses in DNS

• Set timezone

  timedatectl set-timezone Australia/Sydney

• Set editor

  echo "export EDITOR=vim" > /etc/profile.d/editor-vim.sh

• Python

  apt install python-is-python3

• Disable HashKnownHosts

  echo -e "Host *\n    HashKnownHosts no" > /etc/ssh/ssh_config.d/99-global.conf

• Make vim mouse-handling not annoying

  cat <<EOF > /etc/vim/vimrc.local
  syntax on
  set background=dark
  set modeline
  set scrolloff=3
  set mouse=
  set ttymouse=
  filetype plugin indent on
  EOF

• Install packages

  apt install ack jq make elinks nmap whois screen

• Configure screen

  curl -o ~/.screenrc https://gist.githubusercontent.com/barneydesmond/d16c5201ed9d2280251dfca7c620bb86/raw/.screenrc

• Set FQDN

  hostnamectl set-hostname roberta.meidokon.net

• updatedb and reboot

  updatedb
  reboot

tweak firewall

The ISP firewall will have things locked down already, but defence in depth is good.

ufw is already installed and permits only SSH, we need HTTP too.

ufw allow http
ufw allow https
ufw prepend allow from 2404:e80:42e3:0::/64 to any app SSH
ufw prepend allow from 87.121.72.135/32 to any app SSH

# Existing rule is too broad
ufw delete allow 22

install apps

• Infra apps

  apt install imagemagick
  apt install mariadb-server

• Caddy for HTTP, following official docs:

  apt install -y debian-keyring debian-archive-keyring apt-transport-https
  curl -1sLf https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/gpg.key        > /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/caddy-stable.asc
  curl -1sLf https://dl.cloudsmith.io/public/caddy/stable/debian.deb.txt > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-stable.list
  
  apt update
  apt install caddy

This uses a systemwide config in /etc/caddy/Caddyfile, and acts as a generic HTTP server initially. It's serving up a Caddy landing page from /usr/share/caddy at http://roberta.meidokon.net/

create user account

useradd -m -s /bin/bash blog
su - blog
mkdir -p ~/public_html/blog.meidokon.net

echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > ~/public_html/blog.meidokon.net/index.php

get php working

• Install PHP packages, Debian 11 is on PHP 7.4

  apt install php7.4-common php7.4-fpm php7.4-curl php7.4-mysql php7.4-xml php-imagick php7.4-cli php7.4-mbstring php7.4-zip php7.4-intl

• Create a PHP-FPM pool config
  • cd /etc/php/7.4/fpm/pool.d
  • cp www.conf blog.conf

  • Edit it up kinda like so:

    [blog]
    user = blog
    group = blog
    
    listen = /run/php/php7.4-fpm-blog.sock
    
    listen.owner = caddy
    listen.group = caddy
    
    pm = dynamic
    pm.max_children = 5
    pm.start_servers = 2
    pm.min_spare_servers = 1
    pm.max_spare_servers = 3

  • Restart php-fpm: systemctl restart php7.4-fpm.service

• Setup a vhost in /etc/caddy/Caddyfile above the default vhost

  roberta.meidokon.net {
          root * /home/blog/public_html/blog.meidokon.net
          file_server
          php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php7.4-fpm-blog.sock
          log {
              output file /var/log/caddy/blog.log
          }
  }

• Reload the config: systemctl reload caddy

Now try reaching the domain, it should work, and magically have TLS working.

Wordpress

Running a vanilla Wordpress 5.9 for https://blog.meidokon.net/

Wordpress has come a long way, I'm genuinely impressed. The editor is fantastic now, the new Content Blocks scheme makes it a contender to Squarespace in my eyes, but you can self-host instead of using their cloud. Full control over the potential for speed and caching is very, very nice.

• Grab https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz and unpack it to ~furinkan/public_html/blog.meidokon.net

• Setup mysql DB, this is all muscle memory now

  CREATE USER 'blog'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'ASecurePassword';
  CREATE DATABASE blog;
  GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON blog.* TO 'blog'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;

Hit the domain and it'll ask you for setup credentials.

Trigger periodic backups

I'm using the "Backup Migration" plugin for Wordpress to get a periodic dump of the site: https://backupbliss.com/

It takes a weekly backup at Monday on 09:00 (Sydney time), and retains the last 8 backups. Backups are stored in ~blog/public_html/backups/

How does it work? It slides into the normal request flow and performs the necessary actions if it determines they're due. But what happens if your site isn't trafficked enough? Then it'll always be late.

This isn't really a problem, but I like my regular backups. I've setup a cronjob owned by the blog user to hit the frontpage every hour like so:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 * * * * wget -O /dev/null --quiet --timeout=60 --header='X-Purpose: trigger a periodic backup' https://blog.meidokon.net/

Tune PHP for uploads etc

Thanks to this page: https://www.kasareviews.com/fix-upload-max-filesize-wordpress-error/

Edit /etc/php/7.4/fpm/php.ini and set:

post_max_size = 32M
upload_max_filesize = 20M

Then restart the php-fpm service.

Importing a wordpress site

Assuming you do the XML dump, that gets you most of the way there. Assuming the source site is still up, it'll download all the media from the old site and bring it over. That rocks!

What you still need to do:

• Download themes and activate
• Customise the active theme
  • Colours etc
  • Assign menus (retained) to location in theme
• Install the same plugins
  • Activate them and enable auto-updates

Import astcd2 wordpress

• Create user account

  useradd -s /bin/bash -m astcd2
  su - astcd2
  mkdir -p ~/public_html/mikanya.meidokon.net/
  
  echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > ~/public_html/mikanya.meidokon.net/index.php

  • Copy password hash from old server

  • Copy authorized_keys from old server

• Setup new PHP FPM pool, duplicate existing file and change these settings

  [poolname]
  user = 
  group =
  listen =

  • Reload the config: systemctl reload php7.4-fpm.service

• Setup a vhost in /etc/caddy/Caddyfile above the default vhost

  astcd2.meidokon.net {
          root * /home/astcd2/public_html/mikanya.meidokon.net
          file_server
          php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php7.4-fpm-astcd2.sock
          log {
              output file /var/log/caddy/astcd2.log
          }
  }

  • Reload the config: systemctl reload caddy

• Setup mysql database for the site

  • Copy ~/.my.cnf from old server, chmod 0600

  • Create the DB with same credentials

    CREATE USER 'astcd2'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'ASecurePassword';
    CREATE DATABASE mikanya_prod;
    GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mikanya_prod.* TO 'astcd2'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;

• Take backups of the site on the old server, then rsync them to new server as astcd2

• Import DB dump:

  gunzip 2022-01-31_mikanya_db_backup.gz
  mv 2022-01-31_mikanya_db_backup 2022-01-31_mikanya_db_backup.sql
  mysql mikanya_prod < 2022-01-31_mikanya_db_backup.sql

• Copy the web content over

  rsync -avx arkroyal:/home/astcd2/public_html/mikanya.meidokon.net/ ./public_html/mikanya.meidokon.net/

• Patch up DNS to point at the new server

• Go poke /wp-admin/ and make it happy. We need to fix image loading because it's using the old domain name, with http instead of https

  • Also need to fix the google analytics, which loads using http://www.blah, we should make that //www.blah

765.agency

• User account furinkan already exists, su to them

• Create webhome dir: mkdir -p ~/public_html/765.agency

• Copy content

  rsync -avx arkroyal:/home/furinkan/public_html/765.agency/ /home/furinkan/public_html/765.agency/

• Copy cloudflare origin certs, as root

  rsync -avx arkroyal:/etc/ssl/private/cloudflare* /etc/ssl/private/
   * Update DNS for 765.agency at Cloudflare DNS mgmt
   * Add domain to Caddy to serve up the homedir as static content {{{
  765.agency {
          root * /home/furinkan/public_html/765.agency
          file_server
          tls /etc/ssl/private/cloudflare_origin-765.agency.crt /etc/ssl/private/cloudflare_origin-765.agency.key
  }

• Fix cert perms so caddy can read them

  chgrp caddy /etc/ssl/private/cloudflare_origin-765.agency.*
  chmod g+r /etc/ssl/private/cloudflare_origin-765.agency.key
  
  chgrp caddy /etc/ssl/private/
  chmod g+rx /etc/ssl/private/

• Reload the config: systemctl reload caddy

Trying docker for moinmoin wiki

apt install docker.io

Hack up the dockerfile, and you know what just fork and tweak the whole thing: https://github.com/barneydesmond/moinmoin-wiki-docker

make build

useradd -m -s /bin/bash moin
usermod -aG docker moin
su - moin
mkdir ~/meidokon_wiki

docker run -e TZ=Australia/Sydney -e MOIN_UID=1003 -e MOIN_GID=1003 -d -p 8000:80 -v /home/moin/meidokon_wiki:/usr/local/share/moin/data --name meidokon_wiki meidokon-moin

Migrate the content over now

[root@roberta:~] rsync -avx arkroyal:/home/moin/moin_instance/data/ /home/moin/meidokon_wiki/

Kill and rm the container, then run it again as moin user

Yeah this seems to work. Jump into the container and clean the cache

moin --config-dir=/usr/local/share/moin/wikiconfig.py maint cleancache

Flip the DNS over to make it work, updating your caddy config and reloading it.

Yeah it looks surprisingly good, I even fixed up the light novel title generator too. You can reload the python runtime by doing:

root@roberta:~# make -C ~/git/moinmoin-wiki-docker/ shell
uwsgi --reload /run/uwsgi-moinmoin.pid
logout

Little Makefile for management

We want the process to run as the moin user, and it needs to come up after reboot.

IMAGENAME := meidokon-moin
DATADIR := /home/moin/meidokon_wiki
HTTP_PORT := 8000
RUNNING_CONTAINER_NAME := meidokon_wiki
TZ := Australia/Sydney
MOIN_UID := 1003
MOIN_GID := 1003

run:
        -docker kill $(RUNNING_CONTAINER_NAME)
        sleep 2
        -docker container rm meidokon_wiki
        docker run -e TZ=$(TZ) -e MOIN_UID=$(MOIN_UID) -e MOIN_GID=$(MOIN_GID) -d --restart unless-stopped -p $(HTTP_PORT):80 -v $(DATADIR):/usr/local/share/moin/data --name $(RUNNING_CONTAINER_NAME) $(IMAGENAME)

shell:
        docker exec -it meidokon_wiki /bin/bash

cleancache:
        # Get a shell with `make shell` then run:
        #   moin --config-dir=/usr/local/share/moin/wikiconfig.py maint cleancache

reload-python-runtime:
        # Get a shell with `make shell` then run:
        #   uwsgi --reload /run/uwsgi-moinmoin.pid
        #   logout