wnd's weblog

Good old katei.fi, or in particular, ayame.katei.fi, is finally gone. It was difficult to let go, but my ISP offered a deal I couldn’t refuse.

This entry was written mostly on 25 Sep 2019, but released with the date of the actual event.

Back in the days I’d paid a single-time charge of 20 euros (read: peanuts) for a static IP address, and later for a second one. Eventually I was offered and given a /29-block, free of charge, with no recurring cost other than that of my internet connectivity. Now they’d start charging a monthly fee for each address. This was not going to happen.

First, I’d have to host my DNS elsewhere. If you can say that, luckily Description The Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority has previously stirred the pot and practically disallowed private individuals from hosting their own domain name. With that, I’d already migrated katei.fi domain to Gandi.

Second, email. I was at the time hosting my own email. Indeed, Nebula allowed one to serve SMTP, and mail servers of the world were fine with that. With my static IP, I never was on any of the blacklists that I could find. Then again, why would’ve it been? Fortunately Gandi took care of this as well. Using a email forwarding service provided by iki.fi caused a bit of trouble, but nothing that I couldn’t overcome. Well, mostly, anyway.

Third, but definitely not any less important, my incremental backups. Until then I’d have my daily incremental backups on a RAID-1 on ayame. Now that would have to be off-site. Off-site was obviously an improvement, but now I’d have to worry about secure transport and storage. I eventually turned out to Kapsi. This allowed me to use SSH as transport, and encrypted Borg backup as storage. I’d already been using Attic on ayame.

Then the less-than-critical stuff. Website. Kapsi could easily host my site, although some changes were required. Previously I’d been running Apache in my custom chroot, which I had lovingly maintained. Now I’d have to rely on what Kapsi was providing. This is when I stopped running my live copy of Woclema to run my weblog. Instead, I just used wget –mirror to produce static files. This is also why I couldn’t be botherer to post anything new.

IRC. ayame was running multiple copies of miau, an IRC proxy fork of mine. Again, kapsi would provide me a place for these. I’d set up an automatic SSH tunnel for IRC. This would eventually use keepalive.

SSH access. With my home server and its beautiful range of static IP addresses, it would be tricker to access kikai from the world. My new ISP would allow open upper ports, but I couldn’t rely on these. Instead, I set up a series of tunnels through a third party.

Related to permanent shutdown of ayame.katei.fi, I’d later start running a NAS at home. This would be a low-power device, and allow my workstation to get rid of spinning disks entirely.

All in all, the exercise to get rid of ayame.katei.fi was, while rocky, also a success and well worth it.