This #GoToSocial account has become a step-by-step tutorial in how to self-host the publishing platform #Ghost (and troubleshoot issues)

If you're not interested in my messages on the subject, I will be using a new hashtag #EleSelfHostsGhost so you can just mute it.

I'm a little late to the party because everything is now set-up and running smoothly:
I manually installed Ghost on my Ubuntu VPS
I imported all the old posts and media: https://news.elenarossini.com
I installed #Apache to use #Varnish cache and changed the cache's maxAge so that a bit of traffic wouldn't overwhelm my VPS
I published and shared on Mastodon a new blog post: https://news.elenarossini.com/what-im-up-to-march-april-2025-edition/ Thanks to Varnish and the maxAge cache tweak, the VPS withstood the "Mastodon stampede" (the post had made it to Explore!)

So far so good.

but when I tried to send that blog post as a newsletter to just 210 people, #Mailgun immediately flagged me as a spammer and froze my account

It took about 48 hours of back-and-forth emails with the Mailgun team to convince them I'm not a spammer and to get my account reinstated.

Now, why am I sharing all this?

In case you are also tempted to self-host Ghost, I found that the official Ghost - Mailgun documentation has little information available. But I discovered this super helpful post in the Ghost Forums and I will be trying this tweak to see if it makes a difference:

https://forum.ghost.org/t/unable-to-send-newsletter-with-correct-mailgun-api-keys/34186/6

And yes, I'm aware that if you sign up for my newsletter you will get an email with a warning "this message failed the domain authentication" (or something along these lines). Problem is, when I implemented a tweak, changing config settings, the alert went away but I saw a spike in activity in my Dashboard, as if I had sent 600 emails (I did not). For now I can live with the warning.

I appreciate Ghost's new implementation of a spam filter because around the same time I got really suspicious signups originating from the same domain.

Anyway after I change all this I will try to send once again my blog post as a newsletter.

Special thanks to my parents for looking after my little one so I can do all this while she's on a school vacation

my adventures in #selfhosting - day 111 (quiet edition)

Good morning Fedi friends!

I hope you had a nice weekend.

After backing up my two VPSs I am now staring at my #YunoHost dashboard thinking: now what?

It feels a little odd not to have to tackle any pressing self-hosting issues. Everything seems to be working well, including my manual installation of Ghost on a second (Ubuntu) VPS.

I'm now in maintenance mode.

I must confess in the past 24 hours I have spent some time browsing @yunohost 's app catalogue. So many fascinating things in there! But I am exercising restraint (for now, LOL!)

I'm very grateful for all the software I'm currently self-hosting.

On Debian (via YunoHost):

• #Fail2Ban
• #Friendica -> https://elenarossini.fr/profile/ele/
• #GoToSocial (this account!)
• #LinkStack -> https://elena.social
• #Pixelfed -> https://photos.elenarossini.com/ele

On Ubuntu:

• Fail2Ban
• My #Ghost blog/newsletter -> https://news.elenarossini.com
• #Varnish cache

I'm highly aware of my privilege and how lucky I am to be doing all this. But can I confess I'm a little bored? Thankfully I may have another big project on the horizon: upgrading my VPS and installing / self-hosting #PeerTube. But that will be for another week. Resting now and enjoying this sense of empowerment / digital sovereignty. Very grateful to be in this position.

Wishing you all a fantastic week!

my adventures in #selfhosting - day 104 (pride edition)

Good morning Fedi friends!

Aw pride is a powerful thing.

I'd like to think that I'm pretty zen and detached and successfully suppressing my ego... but when it comes to things I'm passionate about (read: tech, self-hosting) I cannot let things go.

I had a very very sweet shout-out on a Fediverse podcast last week... but said shout-out mentioned my self-hosting issues and that maybe self-hosting isn't for everyone. I felt that I had to correct the record (even if the mention came with the nicest intention)... because I have ZERO issues self-hosting #GoToSocial, #Friendica and #Pixelfed (thanks to the magic of #YunoHost). All my troubles had to do with #Ghost. (And Ghost is wonderful, it's not related to it, just external circumstances).

So, determined to defend my honor (ha!) on Friday I achieved the impossible: all by myself, following guides I found online, I managed to install #Apache and #Varnish on my VPS and connected Varnish to Ghost. My site was already fast, now it's BLAZING fast.

So I'm giving it another go, moving from Ghost (Pro) to my self-hosted Ghost installation. I turned off subscriptions on https://blog.elenarossini.com... next step is disconnecting the subdomain DNS (a CNAME record) from Ghost... and redirecting traffic to my new blog (https://news.elenarossini.com).

I know how to code things in NGINX for the redirect to work (I think, via guides I found online).

My big question is: how do I tweak my old DNS records for https://blog.elenarossini.com so that NGINX on my self-hosted site https://news.elenarossini.com will correctly pick up the traffic requests? Do I need to set up A and AAAA records for the subdomain blog to point to my VPS with the self-hosted Ghost blog? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! ​

Oh and I learned my lesson and - unlike last time - I am making big changes on a Monday morning, when I have the whole workweek ahead of me (instead of a Friday afternoon 1 hour before picking up my child from nursery school). You live and learn! ​

#MySoCalledSudoLife

I've performed some tests, and it's great. #snac and #haproxy are working great together - now with caching of media and json responses, to scale up, and up, and up...and up!
#Varnish is the best tool for caching, but the setup I've tested doesn't require it and it's still good enough.
I think this will be a blog post, as soon as I'll have enough time.

For no particular reason (masochism?), we've revamped varnishmon's UI from espagueti vanilla #JavaScript to #React. It's a toy UI, but it should handle 1k-2k live time-series per page smoothly.

Do I know anyone with real JavaScript chops to take a look and tell me how bad it is, especially the React part? It's just a couple of files: https://github.com/allenta/varnishmon/blob/main/assets/web/src/js/components.jsx

PRs welcome, of course #sendhelp #devtears #jsconfessions #varnish

A fully varnished wooden sailboat.

Plymouth, must've been around 2015/16.

A new post on debugging your Varnish VMOD with gdb.

Be sure to set the right shared library search path!

https://duffn.dev/debugging-varnish-vmod-with-gdb/

First coats of Total Boat Halcyon on the #coffeetable. I’m planning 2 coats of amber gloss followed by a coat or 2 of clear satin. Water based, easy to apply, and looks great so far.
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#maker #pghmaker #diy #wood #woodworking #varnish #finishing #coffee #furniture #empireofdust

Thijs Feryn discusses Varnish caching in Plone https://2024.ploneconf.org/en/schedule/talks/varnish-caching-in-plone #ploneconf2024 #pythoncerrado2024 #plone #python #opensource #varnish #cache #cookies #brasilia

we need more varnish
to disguise reputation tarnish
lipstick as garnish

#haiku #poetry #writing #WritingCommunity #PoetryCommunity #varnish #tarnish #lipstick

#MastoPrompt #garnish
@stevencudahy

My blog is hosted and served from three different locations: an httpd and relayd stack on OpenBSD, a FreeBSD jail, and a Raspberry Pi Zero W powered by NetBSD - and they all contain all the files.

The VM on OpenBSD is located in the Netherlands at OpenBSD Amsterdam, a provider offering OpenBSD VMs on OpenBSD hosts, contributing a portion of earnings to the OpenBSD Foundation. Their setup is transparent and well-documented, enabling full understanding of the underlying infrastructure.

Varnish is configured across the various hosts to use all three resources as backends, ensuring that data remains accessible to the reverse proxies even if two of the servers go down.

And, in the event that all three go down, the reverse proxies will continue to serve the cached versions for days.

https://it-notes.dragas.net

Make Your Own CDN With NetBSD

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/09/03/make-your-own-cdn-netbsd/

Make Your Own CDN With OpenBSD Base and Just 2 Packages

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/08/29/make-your-own-cdn-openbsd/

Building a Self-Hosted CDN for BSD Cafe Media

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2024/08/26/building-a-self-hosted-cdn-for-bsd-cafe-media/

I've just finished drafting the article on the custom and "home-made" CDN created for BSD Cafe's media and my blog - should be out by Monday.

I also set up another VPS and performed the same setup using OpenBSD, replacing nginx with relayd (but keeping Varnish).

It was even easier... I might write a dedicated post on the OpenBSD setup soon.

Friends of the #BSDCafe and of the #Fediverse,
initially, for just over a year, BSD Cafe's media was stored in a FreeBSD physical server jail with an outgoing bandwidth of 250 Mbit/sec. To address bandwidth congestion, I had integrated Cloudflare with a tunnel, serving media (and only media) through Cloudflare.

In line with the principles of self-hosting and data ownership, I’ve decided to remove Cloudflare. This has led to some bandwidth congestion when media was posted and slower download speeds for users, particularly during peak times. This is because as soon as content is published and federated servers are notified, they will rush (depending on how full their queues are) to download the newly published content - media included.

I’ve now revised the setup (currently in beta) by moving DNS management to two personal nameservers run with PowerDNS. The media server remains the same, but I’ve added two reverse proxies, one in the USA and one in Germany (the media server is in Poland). They're connected to the Media server via WireGuard.
I’ve installed the excellent Varnish and created a custom VCL. Media requests will be directed by the PowerDNS LUA scripts to the caller's closest reverse proxy. Nginx will pass requests to Varnish, which will serve data from the cache if available. If not, it will fetch from the original server, but request volume has decreased significantly.

I’m analyzing the results, and they look very promising. I may expand this home-made CDN by adding more VPSs, potentially closer to Asia and Oceania.

A detailed blog post will follow.

Stay tuned!