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<h1 class="text-indigo-400 text-3xl">Lessons Learned From Self-Hosting</h1>
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<span class="text-md mt-2">Posted on 2020-01-03</span>
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<article class="prose lg:prose-lg text-white mt-4">
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<p>Roughly eight months ago, according to my hosting provider, I spun up my VM which
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I use to this day to self-host my chat, my mail, my git and so on. At the beginning, I thought that
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it would allow me both to get away from proprietary software and to learn Linux administration. While
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my first goal was met without any problems, the second one I achieved in ways I did not anticipate.</p>
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<span id="continue-reading"></span>
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<p>During these eight months, I learned quite a lot. Not by reading documentation, but by messing up
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deployments. So this post is my telling of how I messed up and what lessons I learned from it.</p>
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<h1 id="lesson-1-document-everything">Lesson 1: Document everything</h1>
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<p>I always tell people that you should document your code. When asked why I answer that you won't
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remember what that line does when you have not looked at your codebase for weeks or months.</p>
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<p>What I did not realise is that this also applies to administration. I only wrote basic documentation
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like a howto for certificate generation or a small troubleshooting guide. This, however, missed the most
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important thing to document: the entire infrastructure.</p>
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<p>Whenever I needed to look up my port mapping, what did I do? I opened up my <em>Docker compose</em> configuration
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and search for the port mappings. What did I do when I wanted to know what services I have? Open my
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<em>nginx</em> configuration and search for <code>server</code> directives.</p>
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<p>This is a very slow process since I have to remember what services I have behind a reverse proxy and which
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ones I have simply exposed. This lead me in the end to creating a folder - called <code>docs</code> - in which
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I document everything. What certificates are used by what and where they are, port mappings, a graph
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showing the dependencies of my services, ... While it may be tedious to create at first, it will really
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help.</p>
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<pre style="background-color:#2b303b;color:#c0c5ce;"><code><span>[World]
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</span><span>+
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</span><span>|
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</span><span>+-[443]-[nginx]-+-(blog.polynom.me)
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</span><span> +-(git.polynom.me)-[gitea]
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</span></code></pre>
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<p>Above, you can see an excerpt from my <em>"network graph"</em>.</p>
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<h1 id="lesson-2-version-control-everything">Lesson 2: Version Control everything</h1>
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<p>Version Control Systems are a great thing. Want to try something out? Branch, try out and then either
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merge back or roll back. Want to find out what changes broke something? Diff the last revisions and narrow
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down your "search space". Want to know what you did? View the log.</p>
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<p>While it might seem unneccessary, it helps me keep my cool, knowing that if I ever mess up my configuration, I
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can just roll back the configuration from within git.</p>
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<h1 id="lesson-3-have-a-test-environment">Lesson 3: Have a test environment</h1>
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<p>While I was out once, I connected to a public Wifi. There, however, I could not connect to my VPN. It simply
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did not work. A bit later, my Jabber client <em>Conversations</em> told me that it could not find my server. After
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some thinking, I came to the conclusion that the provider of said public Wifi was probably blocking port <code>5222</code>
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<em>(XMPP Client-to-Server)</em> and whatever port the VPN is using. As such, I wanted to change the port my
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Jabber server uses. Since I do not have a failover server I tried testing things out locally, but gave up
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after some time and just went and "tested in production". Needless to say that this was a bad idea. At first,
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<em>Conversations</em> did not do a DNS lookup to see the changed XMPP port, which lead me to removing the DNS entry.
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However, after some time - probably after the DNS change propagated far enough - <em>Conversations</em> said that it
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could not find the server, even though it was listening on port <code>5222</code>. Testing with the new port yieled
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success.</p>
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<p>This experience was terrible for me. Not only was it possible that I broke my Jabber server, but it would
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annoy everyone I got to install a Jabber client to talk to me as it would display <em>"Cannot connect to..."</em>.
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If I had tested this locally, I probably would have been much calmer. In the end, I nervously watched as everyone
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gradually reconnected...</p>
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<h1 id="lesson-4-use-tools-and-write-scripts">Lesson 4: Use tools and write scripts</h1>
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<p>The first server I ever got I provisioned manually. I mean, back then it made sense: It was a one-time provisioning and nothing should
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change after the initial deployment. But now that I have a continually evolving server, I somehow need to document every step in case
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I ever need to provision the same server again.</p>
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<p>In my case it is <em>Ansible</em>. In my playbook I keep all the roles, e.g. <em>nginx</em>, <em>matterbridge</em>, <em>prosody</em>, separate and apply them to my one
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server. In there I also made <strong>heavy</strong> use of templates. The reason for it is that before I started my <a href="https://blog.polynom.me/Road-to-Foss.html"><em>"Road to FOSS"</em></a>
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I used a different domain that I had lying around. Changing the domain name manually would have been a very tedious process, so I decided to use
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templates from the get-go. To make my life easier in case I ever change domains again, I defined all my domain names based on my <code>domain</code> variable.
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The domain for git is defined as {% raw %}<code>git.{{ domain }}</code>{% endraw %}, the blog one as {% raw %}<code>blog.{{ domain }}</code>{% endraw %}.
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Additionally, I make use of <em>Ansible Vaults</em>, allowing me to have encrypted secrets in my playbook.</p>
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<p>During another project, I also set up an <em>Ansible</em> playbook. There, however, I did not use templates. I templated the configuration files using a Makefile
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that was calling <code>sed</code> to replace the patterns. Not only was that a fragile method, it was also unneeded as <em>Ansible</em> was already providing
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this functionality for me. I was just wasting my own time.</p>
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<p>What I also learned was that one <em>Ansible</em> playbook is not enough. While it is nice to automatically provision a server using <em>Ansible</em>, there are other things
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that need to be done. Certificates don't rotate themselves. From that, I derived a rule stating that if a task needs to be done more than once, then it is
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time to write a script for it.</p>
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<h1 id="lesson-4-1-automate">Lesson 4.1: Automate</h1>
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<p>Closely tied to the last point: If a task needs to be performed, then you should consider creating a cronjob, or a systemd timer if that is more your thing,
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to automatically run it. You don't want to enjoy your day, only for it to be ruined by an expired certificate causing issues.</p>
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<p>Since automated cronjobs can cause trouble aswell, I decided to run all automated tasks on days at a time during which I am like to be able to react. As such, it is very
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important to notify yourself of those automated actions. My certificate rotation, for example, sends me an eMail at the end, telling me if the certificates
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were successfully rotated and if not, which ones failed. For those cases, I also keep a log of the rotation process somewhere else so that I can review it.</p>
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<h1 id="lesson-5-unexpected-things-happen">Lesson 5: Unexpected things happen</h1>
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<p>After having my shiny server run for some time, I was happy. It was basically running itself. Until <em>Conversations</em> was unable to contact my server,
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connected to a public Wifi. This is something that I did not anticipate, but happened nevertheless.</p>
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<p>This means that my deployment was not a run-and-forget solution but a constantly evolving system, where small improvements are periodically added.</p>
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<h1 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h1>
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<p>I thought I would just write down my thoughts on all the things that went wrong over the course of my self-hosting adventure. They may not
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be best practices, but things that really helped me a lot.</p>
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<p>Was the entire process difficult? At first. Was the experience an opportunity to learn? Absolutely! Was it fun? Definitely.</p>
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</article>
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If you have any questions or comments, then feel free to send me an email (Preferably with GPG encryption)
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to papatutuwawa [at] polynom.me or reach out to me on the Fediverse at <a href="https://social.polynom.me/papatutuwawa">@papatutuwawa@social.polynom.me</a>.
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