Preparing to Move

Today I had some time to kill and I wasn't feeling like doing any learning on The Odin Project so I decided to do some prep work for moving to subsidized housing. The subsidized housing that I am going to be moving to includes all utilities and internet access. So, I decided to prepare my Mastodon and blog for moving to the new location.

The first thing I had to do was acquire a cheap VPS and I found one with Cloudfanatic. Since I won't have direct control over the network in the new location, I am going to need a VPN tunnel between the virtual machine running on my desktop PC which is powering my systems and the VPS. I did this with a simple WireGuard tunnel. Then I had to change my DNS entries to point to the VPS instead of my home network. That takes care of the infrastructure side of things.

Finally, I had to install and configure NGINX on my VPS so that requests to www.goblackcat.com and www.goblackcat.social get redirected to the virtual machine running on my desktop. Once this was complete, I could again access both blog and Mastodon. It turned out to be a fair amount of work which I completed relatively quickly; before the fediverse noticed an outage and dinged me for it. Right now, I am hovering around 98.43% uptime and I'd like to get that to 99%.