I’ve been doing some work on the back-end of this website. It now has Varnish caching with an Nginx reverse proxy for SSL. I have modified WordPress to eliminate the resulting redirect loop that was caused by the SSL detection not working properly because of Lighttpd. Also, I have setup servers in Las Vegas, Miami, and Luxembourg (soon to be Switzerland), with the intention of using Anycast or a CDN to make this site highly available and redundant and to speed page loading times around the world. I continue to work on the back-end of this website as I learn these new technologies, which are actually easy to implement, however right now I am trying to determine how and what I want to implement.
I also have an Anycast DNS solution setup, and I am working to setup AdGuard Home and Unbound resolvers for an Anycast based DNS server, which is also the nameserver for my domains using Bind. Since AdGuard supports Quic and DNS over TLS that will be included. This will be a free service for anyone who wants to use it and will be log-free and anonymous, so an alternative to Google or Cloudflare. It is my intention to build up the system so that it is reliable enough I can offer a very inexpensive managed DNS service for small-business or just personal use for those who want something where they can just email someone and say “I want these domains, point them here” and I’ll just set it up for them. I also have usermin for potentially setting up self-service access and maybe even providing managed hosting services. Something like this would make setting up an Anycast based website simple for anyone at a fair price, with the advantage of offering other features like server monitoring since it’s so easy to implement.
Other things
I’m starting a full-time job at Kromek as a test engineer. This will reduce my free time considerably for working on things like the website, but it is still my goal to continue to work on the website. The implementation of most things is simple, but has to be replicated across 3 slave servers.
Speakeasy Hub has been stalled for a while, but it is clear that the server is stable. With Anycast now on the table, Speakeasy Hub can now operate with it. Server linking will be tested eventually. One of the things I want to figure out is SASL authentication with UnrealIRCd, since it seems to support it but I couldn’t implement it. The website was lost, however I may have a backup on my storage drives, but I haven’t gotten around to reconnecting them and cleaning the drives up and looking for the server backup, however the server is currently up if you wish to use it, just not stable at this point without any redundancy. My goal, as with the website, is to make Speakeasy Hub a stable reliable network and provide it as a free service for the public.
Update (3/17/2025):
The site is now proxied by Cloudflare. At the moment, I only have the free plan. I do not like that Cloudflare has effectively hijacked my DNS and the zone transfer option is only available for enterprise level customers, since I do run my own DNS now, and it is Anycast DNS. I will experiment with Cloudflare for a bit and see how it does. I am especially interested in their image proxying which is a paid service. Cloudflare has great statistics parsing, and I can already see I had a visit from Alaska. I am curious to know how much traffic my site actually generates, so this is nice. However, the backend is clunky now. That could be mitigated by using my second domain hosted by my own DNS with Cloudflare for K1VZX.com as a more permanent and fixed domain. I did obtain a wildcart cert from Letsencrypt, but now that is replaced by Cloudflare SSL cert which is a trusted cert. Quite a good deal for free, but their Pro plan I don’t think I can justify.