Hey y’all, Ritchie here.
After some deep soul-searching, and a few minor inconveniences, I have decided that my current network setup for this forum and other acidic light community services needs an upgrade.
This is not to say that the current setup isn’t viable, just that I’d like to improve things.
The current setup
I maintain three domains:
acidiclight.dev: My personal site, and services meant for all of my projects.sociallydistantgame.com: Everything to do with Socially Distant.acidiclight.page: My GitLab Pages server
Most services are hosted on a kinda-shitty gaming PC at home that I’ve upgraded as much as reasonably possible to support this community. It has an AMD A10-7700K APUU with 4 cores and no simultaneous multithreading (hyperthreading for the Intel folks), and 16GB of DDR3 RAM. It works fine, but if a few of you start browsing around, it’ll start to choke a little.
I don’t expose this server directly to the Internet, because dynamic DNS is a pain in the arse to set up and we don’t have a static IP address. GitLab Pages, in certain cases, also requires its very own static IP to listen on. Residential networks generally don’t have multiple static IP addresses.
The way you’re reading this page is through a Wireguard gateway that I host on Vultr. The VPS plan I’m using is underpowered for this, and is a network bottleneck when more than a few users are connecting at once. It is also a point of failure, if that one VPS ever goes down for whatever reason, everything else does as well.
What I actually host, and where
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When you log into this forum, or anything else related to this community, you are signing in with an acidic light community account. This is powered by authentik, on its own (underpowered) VPS.
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If you use our GitLab (https://gitlab.acidiclight.dev/), that’s hosted on the gaming PC.
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This forum, I think, is hosted on another vultr VPS. Can’t remember though, and that’s a problem.
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My Docker container registry (
cr.acidiclight.dev) and GitLab Pages server (acidiclight.page) are hosted on the gaming PC. -
My personal site/blog, the Socially Distant website, and the Socially Distant Online Manual, are all hosted on GitLab Pages - and thus that gaming PC.
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I maintain a Nextcloud server for the SD dev team, that’s hosted on the gaming PC.
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My GitLab EE instance has two CI/CD instance runners. Both of them run on my main desktop computer which is significantly more powerful. They run inside a virtual machine on it, that takes 2 cores and 4GB of RAM away from being used for actual stuff I’m actually doing on this actual workstation. It also means that this computer MUST BE ON 24/7, or all CI/CD pipelines will cease to function. This includes the Windows ones, that are actually executed on AWS EC2 instances that are provisioned by the VM running here at home. That’s stupid.
What I’m planning
You may be aware of Hetzner’s server auction.
My main PC has a Ryzen 7 3700X, 64GB of DDR4 RAM, and a shit ton of other beefy resources that I can use when doing gamedev. However, GitLab would absolutely love to take advantage of that RAM as well.
I was able to, thanks to y’all wonderful Patreon supporters, to score a practically-identical Hetzner aucion server to what I have as my main PC at home. I am planning on moving everything to it.
When will it happen?
I am going to try to keep things transitioning smoothly. By the time I’ve written this, I haven’t started yet.
As I migrate each service, that service will stop functioning for a day or two as I fuck around way too much in a command-line moving backups and Dockerfiles from server to server.
So here’s the order in which I’ll (try not to) break things.
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Authentik: During this time, you won’t be able to log into things. If you already have active sessions on GitLab, Nextcloud, or this forum, those sessions will still be considered valid. But if they expire or you log out, you won’t be able to get back in until I’m done.
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Nextcloud: This is an internal resource, so it makes sense to get that done first.
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S3 gateway (
cdn.acidiclight.dev): During this time, you will still be able to upload images and other files to this forum, but they will not load. -
GitLab: During this time, all three sites (my blog, SD’s site, and SD’s manual) - as well as any sites hosted by the community on GitLab Pages, will be offline. You also won’t be able to push to or pull from repositories, access the NuGet registry needed to build SD, or access Docker containers I’ve built.
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This forum: It’s somehow more annoying to migrate than GitLab, so I want to do it last.
Further plans
After the server migration is done, this forum will be rebranded. I want the branding to be more consistent with the acidic lighthouse Discord server - so, welcome to the acidic lighthouse. The forum will move to lighthouse.acidiclight.dev, but the old domain will redirect traffic.
I will also be rebranding acidic light community accounts. They will become acidic lighthouse accounts.
