We interrupt this program

(tl,dr: Blog has switched to HTTPS served from a Raspberry Pi; please email me (aardvark at saintaardvarkthecarpeted dot com) if there are any problems. And now, on with the show.)

Back in, what, September? really can't remember, my aging P4 home server finally died. It was a discard from a previous job, and must've been close to 8 years old. I did my usual thing: scramble for backups and set everything up on Linode while I thought about what to do next.

(Linode is awesome, by the way; I can't say enough good. They're stable, they're cheap and I have never, never had a single problem with them. If they were Canadian I would seriously consider hosting my site with them permanently.

There was no additional spare P4 in the closet this time, and anyhow I was getting tired of the noise. I decided to bite the bullet and buy a Raspberry Pi. Yes, non-free, yes, lots of other small Linux machines, but this was cheap and I could buy it locally (and thus quickly). I splurged on a 64GB SSD for home directories, and gradually started setting it up. "Gradually" at least in part because Puppet takes about 20 minutes to do a single run; I'm writing my own modules and I'm sure there are about 20 things I'm doing wrong, but still.

At the moment I've got my site hosted there, including this blog. Mail for my domain gets delivered there too. SSL is turned on for much of the site and more as I get around to it. I've had to start rebuilding the blog (which uses the wonderful Chronicle blog compiler) on my laptop, because build times went from 5 minutes on the P4 (assuming memcache needed to be warmed up) to 5 hours, but that didn't take long to do. IPv6 is set up again, too, and I see a surprising amount of traffic through it.

All of which is to say: if you are having problems reading this blog, please let me know. (Hopefully the RSS is working for everyone...)