--- title: "End of Summer 2023" date: 2023-08-27T15:37:00+03:00 --- Just before this summer I [laid out my roadmap]({{< ref "log/2023/roadmap-summer-2023.md" >}}) for, well, the summer. Here is a quick retrospective. Weird order, because it is somewhat chronological. Project 2: my take on universal headers --------------------------------------- During [SYCL 2023][sycl2023] I was told that [Johny Marler][marler] expressed explicit interest in the project. I have much higher hopes in him than myself -- at which point I decided there are better things to do and shelved universal-headers. Non-ironically, I am no longer working on compiling lots of C++ code, so this area has less ROI for the potentially invested time. Project 1: city limits ---------------------- Showing any spatial result requires a background map. In the spirit of protomaps, I looked into how to host the base maps myself. That was quite a rabbit hole with twists and turns, designed to misguide the non-initiated. Since maps are simple pictures (PNG squares) with a bit of JavaScript to download and display them, I wanted to "keep things simple" and serve the files with a plain web server. Which meant pre-generating many tiles from the OpenStreetMap data. Turns out, this results in [5 million tiles][calculator] for Lithuania: {{screenshot from geofabrik.com}} Generating 5 million tiles takes at least a day on my small server (I gave up after this time having decided to seek for a different approach). To generate tiles one still needs the usual suspects — PostGIS and friends. So pre-generating Lithuania with a complex process and many dependencies and then serving them via a web server does not really save on "simplicity". After I discarded the pre-generated tiles idea, I looked at how to serve them on the fly. This is how most of the world does it, so this is the beaten path. The usual OpenStreetMap stack consists of: 1. PostGIS with all the data, and the tools to keep it up to date. 2. [mapnik][mapnik], a map renderer. A library written in C++. 3. `renderd`: a daemon that renders map tiles using mapnik. 4. [`mod_tile`][mod_tile]: An Apache module that connects to `renderd` and spits the tiles out in HTTP. I have no interest in maintaining Apache for just the base maps, so `mod_tile` would need to be replaced. [`go_tile`][go_tile] is a good candidate. During my earlier pre-generation phases I found that `image/webp` are about half the size of PNG. As a result, `mod_tile` [can now render `image/webp`](https://github.com/openstreetmap/mod_tile/pull/318) and `go_tile` [can use it](https://github.com/nielsole/go_tile/pull/13). During the middle of all this I understood how my personal stack is unfit for the purpose of ad-hoc projects like this: if I put out something for the world to see, I want it to keep working for years. Serving the base tiles is just part of the problem, but already includes many more moving parts than I would like to maintain on my crumbling servers. So I decided to shelve this mapping project and spend some attention spans to "my infrastructure". Project 3a: home lab "infrastructure" ------------------------------------ As alluded in the previous section, the "home infrastructure" was not in a shape I would be happy to maintain long-term. If I start a project that I can show off, it needs to work for a long time with no or minimal maintenance. At the beginning of Summer I ran two Debian servers that needed to be upgraded. They have been configured by two thousand lines of Ansible YAMLs. I felt that writing the yamls were a necessary pain, so grinded it. It was so painful to configure stuff in Ansible that I wrote my own http server instead of using nginx; I wrote my own DNS server instead of using bind or nsd. And I was ready to write even more software from scratch, myself, just because it was so hard to configure out-of-the-box components with Ansible. In an unrelated conversation with my ex-colleague and good friend Ken Micklas, he suggested taking a more serious look into NixOS. I spent most of the summer's "computer time" understanding and dabbing at Nix. Boy it was a great decision. Time will tell, of course, for how long it was a maintainable one, but it shines pretty bright colors now. As of writing, I have the following on a small [Odroid H2+][oh2] computer in my closet: * This web server ([jakstys.lt][config-jakstys.lt]). * [Syncthing][config-syncthing] to synchronize documents, photos and podcasts between my laptop, phone and server. * [My code hosting instance][config-gitea], which is also a "single sign-on" provider. I authenticate to Headscale, Grafana and Gitea using it. I still have separate passwords for IRC and Matrix. IRC has no SSO for being IRC, and for Matrix it's ["on the roadmap"][oidc-matrix] for a while now. * [Home VPN for all my devices][config-headscale]. * [Prometheus + Grafana][config-grafana], accessible only via the personal VPN. * [IRC bouncer][config-soju], so I can visit `#zig` on libera.chat. * [Matrix server][config-synapse], so I can still visit NixOS channels. Blog post about my declining usage of Matrix is coming soon. * [Automatic updates][config-deployerbot] with automatic rollbacks when upgrades fail. * DNS server. Here is the [zone config][config-dns] and the [server config][config-nsd]. This allows me to not use the "free" DNS providers (I have used one before, but had to move after a day-long outage). Having my own DNS server allows me to have letsencrypt certificates with [DNS verification][config-nsd-acme]. * All on an encrypted root file system in ZFS, with nightly backups to rsync.net. The encrypted file system allowed me the liberty to add private data on the server: family photos, chat histories, later -- host a password manager for my family. DNS server is a reason why I run another server. The second server is an AArch64 virtual machine in Hetzner for €3.98/month which serves two purposes: * The [DNS server][config-nsd-fra1]. * Remote [unlocking of the home machine's root partition][config-zfsunlock-fra1]. The servers keep trying to ping and unlock each other in case either of them reboots (hopefully not both at the same time). Why encrypted root partition at home? Because I don't want my family photos and personal documents unencrypted. Project 3b: home and vacation ----------------------------- Originally I planned to take some time off and do all those projects. But after a couple of weeks it turned out that I am unfit for such a regime: the full day goes by and I do not feel like I have achieved more than I would normally have if I were employed. So at mid-August I started actively interviewing. It is ongoing now; I expect to have a job again sooner than I originally thought. I will keep you posted! Next -- Matrix. [calculator]: https://tools.geofabrik.de/calc/#type=geofabrik_standard&bbox=20.602031,53.844653,26.82,56.45 [mod_tile]: https://github.com/openstreetmap/mod_tile [go_tile]: https://github.com/nielsole/go_tile [mapnik]: https://mapnik.org/ [sycl2023]: https://softwareyoucanlove.ca/ [marler]: https://github.com/marler8997/ [oh2]: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h2 [config-headscale]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/modules/services/headscale/default.nix [config-jakstys.lt]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/hosts/vno1-oh2/configuration.nix#L189-L223 [config-grafana]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/hosts/vno1-oh2/configuration.nix#L180-L185 [config-soju]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/hosts/vno1-oh2/configuration.nix#L322-L332 [config-synapse]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/modules/services/matrix-synapse/default.nix [config-deployerbot]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/modules/services/deployerbot/default.nix#L61-L68 [config-gitea]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/modules/services/gitea/default.nix#L26-L68 [oidc-matrix]: https://areweoidcyet.com/ [config-dns]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/data.nix#L87-L118 [config-nsd]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/hosts/vno1-oh2/configuration.nix#L314-L320 [config-nsd-fra1]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/hosts/fra1-a/configuration.nix#L78-L84 [config-zfsunlock-fra1]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/hosts/fra1-a/configuration.nix#L61-L73 [config-nsd-acme]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/hosts/vno1-oh2/configuration.nix#L109-L119 [config-syncthing]: https://git.jakstys.lt/motiejus/config/src/commit/97ef691743cc1b7014055aa47ab70ba7ee529b5f/modules/services/syncthing/default.nix#L35-L39