365 Days of Code - Day 005

More administration work today. I needed a new webserver, as my old AWS server was deleted because I accidentally left it as a spot instance. I started a new DigitalOcean server to give their service a fair shot. This lead me to setting up a private instance of Gitea (opens in a new tab) on my local server to start a repo for server configurations that I do not want to post on the public internet (Github). That further led me down a rabbit hole where I found out my development server could not see any Tailscale (opens in a new tab) machines due to a DNS issue. Once again, none of this is technically code, so I need to find something else to work on. I’m already a few days out from the last time I worked on my Laravel tutorial, and associated sites, so I need to get cranking on that. First, I need to get my new Personal Relationship Manager repo up to date.

The DigitalOcean (opens in a new tab) server is running Ubuntu (opens in a new tab), and before I install any production software, I need to go through some hardening steps. Preventing root user login, setting up new users, enabling firewall rules, fail2ban configuration, software removal, and more. The Center for Internet Security (opens in a new tab) publishes hardening guides mapped to NIST 800-53 (opens in a new tab) controls. The Ubuntu hardening guide is over 1000 pages. While I don’t need every single control, it is a helpful guide for targeting a secure configuration.

The Gitea setup was pretty smooth. I used the container version, which I hosted on Unraid (opens in a new tab). The UI is practically identical to Github, so onboarding was quick and easy. I also setup mirroring for all my Github repos, so I have another copy that automatically updates.

My DNS issue was annoying but ultimately pretty simple to fix. The issue was that resolv.conf was being fought over by dhcpd and Tailscale, and dhcpd was always winning the fight. I had to add nohook resolv.conf to my dhcpcd.conf configuration, which resolved the issue.

Writing up all of these articles into HTML is not a very fun experience. I much prefer writing in Markdown, and Markdown also gives me the option to migrate to a different platform quite easily without changing my writing style or posts. I have changed this so many times, from Wordpress (opens in a new tab) to Astro (opens in a new tab) to 11ty (opens in a new tab) to something else I can’t even remember. Today, I was looking at Ghost (opens in a new tab) and Hugo (opens in a new tab). I really like static sites for type of content. It is fast and easy. I think I’m going to go with Hugo.

If we can call it code, I wrote some Markdown today. I created a readme for the PRM repo (opens in a new tab), so that I could know where to start with the Laravel (opens in a new tab) configuration. I installed the LiveWire (opens in a new tab) starter template, which enabled a number of things, including authentication, but I need to review all of the code generated before I can really begin making edits. The readme file structures the first steps needed to get the application up and running with a MVP alpha build.