"Self Host The Things - Redux"

Posted: 07 March, 2025

Eagle-eyed readers might have noticed that my websites fell off the internet, a few weeks back. Turns out, this was for a couple of reasons: the death of my Firebat, and my ISP making some changes.

Ogi

I love Ogi, they’re easily the best ISP that I’ve ever had. My fat-pipe has been rock solid from the day it was installed, so I wasn’t too bothered when they emailed to say there might be some outage, due to work in my area. In the end, there wasn’t, but I noticed that my IP changed. No biggy?

What I hadn’t noticed was that I was now being port-filtered. That took a little while to work out, and tbh, I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all, if it wasn’t for the fact that the Firebat died the same week. I couldn’t get the new server to actually serve web pages, which lead me down the rabbit hole…

So, I phoned Ogi, and this is why I rate them so much: I got through to a human being. I didn’t have to go through a script, I literally just said: “Hey, I know you’ve made some changes around my area, but I think you’ve just started port-filtering me. Is there any chance you could stop that? Or just open a few ports for me?”

A quick share of some details later, and Mr Ogi support said that he thinks I may be right, they have moved me onto a different subnet, it probably is being filtered, and sure, he can ask engineering if they could move me back out. Entire call, less than two minutes.

A couple of days later, my IP changed, and sure enough, no more port filtering!

I mean, I shouldn’t be so impressed by this. It should be the baseline for any interaction with a company, especially one that provides an important service, but here we are, in 2025 this feels like some sort of magic.

Diolch, Ogi!

Bye Bye Firebat

We now have the answer to the question, “how long does a sub £100 mini-computer from AliExpress last?” Approximately one year.

To be fair to it, I think the SSD died, not anything serious, but I couldn’t be bothered to pull it apart and check. Instead, I ordered a custom build mini-PC from PC Specialist, which I’ve finally had time to configure. It’s a lovely little thing, that’s way over spec, but should last me for a good long while.

I’ve also made some modifications to my setup.

Instead of Nextcloud, I’ve moved to SyncThing, which I highly recommend. Lightweight, does what it says on the tin, and dead simple to configure.

Instead of backing up the new server to B2, I grabbed the lifetime 5TB offer from RSync.net, and I’m pushing Perforce, Git (and my various builds) up there, instead. It’s extremely fast, and I like the fact that I have two different off-site solutions – the NAS still backs up to B2 – for my work and music related backup needs.

And, because I’m an avid listener of Linux podcasts, I thought I’d give Tailscale a try. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d get much out of this, but Magic DNS is worth the price (free!) of entry. It’s super convenient, and it’s already been genuinely handy to ping the NAS, and my DevRig, from anywhere. I’ll probably get a few more people to use this, as it’d make it trivial to share builds or, ahem, “other backups”, to chums.

A fun few days of nerdery has been had.

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