This static site was originally hosted on a beaglebone via Apache. This served this small site well for a long time but around April 2019 the flash memory in the beaglebone corrupted and it would no longer boot. Also co-hosted on the beaglebone was my ttrss site which ran very slowly with its Postgres database so I decided to move on to hosting the blog from my a pi 3.

The pi 3 was nice and fast compared to the beaglebone with its quad core CPU and 1GB of memory. I updated puppet-ttrss to work with debian and deployed the ttrss site and this blog to it and things ran very nicely for about a year. Sadly sometime this summer the flash memory on the pi3 became totally corrupted and this site has been down since at least July. Which kind of sucked. I also wasn’t backing up my ttrss database so it was a total loss which was a little sad.

I took this as an opertunity and bouht a pi4 and booted it from a USB attached flash intel SSD. The pi4 has the maximum 8GB of memory! This is a huge performance improvement. I started looking into updating the ttrss site and niced that Fox is no longer supporting an “normal” install and recommends a docker compose based installation. It feels kind of dumb that I need to use docker to run whats basically a simple LAMP application but whatever. So I got the docker-compose ttrss site running on the pi4 which was super easy. Then I had to docker-ize this blog. To do this I had to create a hugo container which renders the site and then copy’s the “public” folder into a docker volume. I then updated the ttrss docker ngnix container to mount this volume and modified the nginx configuraiton to serve alex.maidak.info from this folder. It works pretty nicely. Doing this helped me learn a little bit more about docker and docker-compose so it was mostly time well spent.

Its amazing to me how fast these tiny computers are now. Four years ago the beaglebone seemed pretty ok with its 800Mhz CPU and 512MB of memory. Now I have a SSD attached 4CPU 8GB beast hosting this site with a 1GBe Link. Pretty awesome.