Site and blog migration

So I've been having an adventurous week here at HA Towers: I decided, after something more than a decade, I'm going to get out of the self-hosting game, as far as I can. It makes me a bit sad, because it's been kinda cool to do and I think it's worked pretty well, but I'm getting to a point where it seems silly that a small part of me has to constantly be concerned with making sure my web and mail servers and all the rest of it keep working, when the services exist to do it much more efficiently. It's cool that it's still possible to do it, but I don't think I need to actually do it any more.

So, if you're reading this...and I didn't do something really weird...it's not being served to you by a Fedora system three feet from my desk any more. It's being served to you by a server owned by a commodity web hoster...somewhere in North America...running Lightspeed (boo) on who knows what OS. I pre-paid for four years of hosting before realizing they were running proprietary software, and I figured what the hell, it's just a web serving serving static files. If it starts to really bug me I'll move it, and hopefully you'll never notice.

All the redirects for old Wordpress URLs should still be in place, and also all URLs for software projects I used to host here (fedfind etc) should redirect to appropriate places in Pagure and/or Pypi. Please yell if you see something that seems to be wrong. I moved nightlies and testcase_stats to the Fedora openQA server for now; that's still a slightly odd place for them to be, but at least it's in the Fedora domain not on my personal domain, and it was easiest to do since I have all the necessary permissions, putting them anywhere else would be more work and require other people to do stuff, so this is good enough for now. Redirects are in place for those too.

I've been working on all the other stuff I self-host, too. Today I set up all the IRC channels I regularly read in my Matrix account and I'm going to try using that setup for IRC instead of my own proxy (which ran bip). It seems to work okay so far. I'm using the Quaternion client for now, as it seems to have the most efficient UI layout and isn't a big heavy wrapper around a web client. Matrix is a really cool thing, and it'd be great to see more F/OSS projects adopting it to lower barriers to entry without compromising F/OSS principles; IRC really is getting pretty creaky these days, folks. There's some talk about both Fedora and GNOME adopting Matrix officially, and I really hope that happens.

I also set up a Kolab Now account and switched my contacts and calendar to it, which was nice and easy to do (download the ICS files from Radicale, upload them to Kolab, switch my accounts on my laptops and phone, shut down the Radicale server, done). I also plan to have it serve my mail, but that migration is going to be the longest and most complicated as I'll have to move several gigs of mail and re-do all my filters. Fun!

I also refreshed my "desktop" setup; after (again) something more than a decade having a dedicated desktop PC I'm trying to roll without one again. Back when I last did this, I got to resenting the clunky nature of docking at the time, and also I still ran quite a lot of local code compiles and laptops aren't ideal for that. These days, though, docking is getting pretty slick, and I don't recall the last time I built anything really chunky locally. My current laptop (a 2017 XPS 13) should have enough power anyhow, for the occasional case. So I got me a fancy Thunderbolt dock - yes, from the Apple store, because apparently no-one else has it in stock in Canada - and a 32" 4K monitor and plugged the things into the things and waited a whole night while all sorts of gigantic things I forgot I had lying around my home directory synced over to the laptop and...hey, it works. Probably in two months I'll run into something weird that's only set up on the old desktop box, but hey.

So once I have all this wrapped up I'm aiming to have substantially fewer computers lying around here and fewer Sysadmin Things taking up space in my brain. At the cost of being able to say I run an entire domain out of a $20 TV stand in my home office. Ah, well.

Oh, I also bought a new domain as part of this whole thing, as a sort of backup / staging area for transitions and also possibly as an alternative vanity domain. Because it is sometimes awkward telling people yes, my email address is happyassassin.net, no, I'm not an assassin, don't worry, it's a name based on a throwaway joke from university which I probably wouldn't have picked if I knew I'd be signing up for bank accounts with it fifteen years later. So if I do start using it for stuff, here is your advance notice that yeah, it's me. This name I just picked to be vaguely memorable and hopefully to be entirely inoffensive, vaguely professional-sounding, and composed of sounds that are unambiguous when read over an international phone line to a call centre in India. It doesn't mean anything at all.

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