little update

as of yesterday, this website’s git repo is now self-hosted!

I foreshadowed this back in august, where I mentioned that github’s acceptable use policy does not allow for “pornographic” material. no, you can’t laugh. I’m an adult, and I’m an artist, I can draw whatever I want, and I’ll be damned if I can’t keep whatever I draw on my fucking website lol. anyways.

all kinds of new benefits come with this as well obviously. for me personally, having this let’s me do thing I quite literally couldn’t figure out how to do before, I’m very excited to play with this. I figured in this post I’d explain how all this works.

the process

I bought a mini pc like a while ago for like $80, it functioned, but I wanted to make it do some work. I figured it was a perfect candidate to have as a little server.

the thing came with a little usb wifi adapter, and that’s about it. while researching how to make it into a server, I learned that debian was quite popular for running servers. apparently ubuntu is also popular, but I had bad experiences with it in the past that I didn’t want to deal with. debian it is.

I flashed the net iso to a flash drive and went to install it, but woe is me, debian didn’t recognize the adapter. I looked around for what I could do, but I honestly didn’t know enough about any of this to attempt compiling an open source recreation of the driver, so I tried something else.

since the driver was build into windows, I figured I could try running the server on windows. few problems: while it’s definetely possible to run a server on windows, I had some use cases in mind for the server where windows was simply not a viable option. also, I would be less worthy of programming socks. fucking unacceptable. I installed wsl2, and my first goal was to ssh from outside the server to inside of it. the first thing I tried was routing the internal ports to where ever the internal ip of the wsl instance. there was a slight problem, however, that wsl’s emulated ip is randomized on boot. fuck me. there were workarounds (see this and this), but they were just far too finnicky. as a last ditch effort I tried this guide, and it worked but it just wasn’t enough. I needed to either go windows only or install linux.

I ordered a new wifi adapter that had kernel level support (what a specific project lmao, 10/10), and they arrived two days ago! yesterday I decided to speedrun getting things set up, and speedrun I did

first thing I did was set up a basic password ssh. turns out it’s actually quite simple to get computers to talk to each other when there isn’t a window in the way ;3. using that, I followed this guide to ditch passwords and use publickey authentication, which was pretty important if I wanted to ssh from wan. then I followed the git book’s server setup guide. this ended up taking like 5 hours because I didn’t know how users and file permissions worked. point is, it worked.

to transfer my github repo to the server, I created an empty repo on the server, cloned the github repo to a seperate directory, changed origin to the empty repo, then pushed. I felt like a genius figuring that out on my own, despite it taking like an hour to figure out. let me have this one T_T

so! yea

up next

I’ll be using this to do silly stuff :3