Cloud
If you’re using any Bitnami images you need to be aware of the changes Bitnami is making to their community offering (and no, I’m not talking about the stunt they pulled last year to block so called unsecure images in their Helm charts coupled with the pull rate changes). On August 28th, 2025...
Cloud
It’s been several years since I last posted anything though it’s not because I haven’t been busy. My goal is to start writing up posts regularly but before I do, I feel I need to recap the last three and a half years. I would recommend that everyone occasionally take time to document their...
Ansible
It seems no one has written a blog post on creating dynamic inventory scripts for Ansible in a while. I feel this topic could use an update as some of the information I found was incomplete or out of date. My goal is was convert Terraforms’s tfstate data from DigitalOcean to a usable inventory...
Ansible
Today, I broke this website while testing some minor changes to the deployment scripts. I tried to figure out what went wrong (I messed up something with Apache while trying to renew the SSL cert). I couldn’t get it sorted out so I blew up the droplet (VM, EC2 instance, whatever) and re-executed...
Ansible
“Done. For now…” All of my goals for the first re-architecture of this website are now complete. This evening I fixed the backup script, added a role that installed EFF’s certbot, and updated the README to reflect the current status. You can see what’s new here...
Ansible
“Baby steps.” I’ve added a single change today. There’s new role that will install and configure the DigitalOcean monitoring agent. In the coming days, I’ve got a few more items to wrap up. Once those (minor) missing pieces are in place, I will call this project done and move on to something...
Ansible
I can’t believe it’s been over two weeks since I touched this project. So far, things have been good. I took a look at AWS with the intent of redoing this project on Lightsail. I assumed it would be cheaper. Unfortunately, it won’t be. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort, but it...
Ansible
“Bootstrapped.” Last night, I migrated this website onto its new infrastructure! The tooling I’ve been working for the last week has become feature-complete enough that it was used to create the database, droplet, and storage volume this site now uses. There was some manual work (SSL...
Ansible
“Biting off more than I can chew.” As of Sunday, I had gotten droplet creation, volume storage, and a good bit of the base OS setup work handled. The major missing piece was the creating the database. I am happy to say that work is now complete, but it’s not without bumps, warts, and bruises. … →
Cloud
We’re onto part two! Luckily, this is a simple change. The VM that runs this website is on DigitalOcean. It’s so old (3 years) that it was only provisioned with 1CPU/512MB of memory. This has been sufficient but it’s a tight squeeze with the reverse proxy and MySQL shoehorned onto the same VM....
Cloud
Let’s embark on a journey to re-architect this website to something that is more resilient. Currently, the entire website runs on a single DigitalOcean droplet. Backups are handled through a Bash script that zips up the application directory, dumps the DB, and tars up the output. This could be...