A Church Workday, Growth Group, and Giving Every Site Its Own Address
A full day — church in the morning, a group in the evening, and a big infrastructure project squeezed in between.
A church workday
Spent 10:30 to 15:30 on a workday at church.
Growth group
My wife and I went to our church's growth group from 18:00 to 20:20.
Giving every one of my websites its own address
Spent a good chunk of today on a real reorganization of how my sites reach the internet. I own a handful of public internet addresses, but every single site I run — all 39 of them — was set up to answer on any of those addresses at once. That made it hard to tell what was actually using which address, and it meant every address was exposed to anything that could reach any of my sites.
Split them up properly instead, grouped by job: the behind-the-scenes admin tools got their own address, my home network's controller got its own, my public websites got their own, customer-facing things like the store and support site got their own, and the certificate services (the system that issues and checks the security certificates for all my sites) got their own. There was no planned downtime, but adding each new address needed a quick restart, so every site blinked for a few seconds along the way.
Cleaned up how each address identifies itself to the outside world too, and locked the firewall down so only the traffic each address is actually supposed to get gets through — instead of being wide open by default the way it was.
A ham-radio compliance problem I caught just in time
Also moved my home DMR radio hotspot's dashboard onto its own dedicated amateur-radio address, which needed a small code change — the system that manages those dedicated addresses used to block everything except a basic connectivity check, so it had to learn to let a real website through too.
Checking into the rules for that amateur-radio address space while I was in there turned up a real problem: I'd been planning to put my main personal site on one of those addresses too, but the nonprofit that runs that address space bans commercial content on it, and my site links to my business, my clients, and a paid product. My main site stayed right where it already was. Instead I built a brand new, ham-radio-only site from scratch tonight — just license info, the hotspot, emergency communications, weather, and my logbook, nothing commercial — and put that on the amateur-radio address instead, with its own deploy setup. The first attempt at deploying it actually wiped the site for about a minute before I caught and fixed the mistake.
Rust-proxy gets a real license and a hotspot theme fix
Also made a real licensing decision on rust-proxy, the tool that routes all this traffic: it's now free to use under an open-source license that requires sharing any changes you make and redistribute, or available as a one-time $10 purchase for anyone who'd rather not deal with those terms. Added that as a real product on my store site the same day. Alongside that, gave it proper multi-user support with different permission levels, and a way to lock a site down to just one page for visitors who shouldn't see the rest of it — already in use on the hotspot dashboard and a guest WiFi portal.
And fixed the dashboard theme on my DMR hotspot after a routine software update quietly wiped my custom color scheme — again. Set up a watcher this time so it puts the colors back automatically after any future update instead of me having to notice and fix it by hand.