Monthly update, July 2023
1 min readIt's summer. Here, in the eastern corner of EU, this July has been wonderful with lots of sun but only a few days with really high temperatures - which for me is > 38 C. There has also been enough rain to keep the water flowing. Sea temperatures are just about perfect. Really nice weather to go to the beach. Nice to ride the motorcycle. A little too hot sometimes to ride the bicycle, but I don't complain. And perfect weather to walk in the nearby national park with my dogs.
So I have been enjoying myself with more than code this month ;)
gRPC
I took a break from the DNS server to get a better understanding about gRPC. So far I have published 7 articles about it - covering the basics - and a little more - regarding the async interface for servers and clients.
stbl
I upgraded my workstation last month to Kubuntu 23.04. One of the things that broke was my static web page generator stbl. I wrote it in 2017. I used boost.Gil to resize the images to the various devices users may use when visiting the site. boost.Gil has changed since 2017. I spent about a day and a half fixing that and fixing some other issues I discovered related to series of articles.
Backup
I've also installed an old, refurbished ThinkCentre mini PC with a i3 CPU with Debian Bookworm. It has a 35 Watts PSU, so it use significantly less electricity than my old Intel Xeon (something) server. The old one was idling at 70 Watts.
When I installed it, I also decided to fix my github backup. I like to have full mirrors of all my repositories on my backup server just in case. "The Cloud" is really just somebody elses computer. I would be naive and stupid if I relied 100% on Microsoft and Github keeping my code safe forever. I have to take ownership and back up my code if I really care about it. Which I do.
After giving up on my old backup script in python 2, and giving up finding a working solution on the "Internet" - I wrote my own conceded, generic bash script to back up/mirror all my GitHub repositories. Backing up my github repositories
With the backup server I use restic to back up all local machines. This allows me to treat the backup server itself as a "no trust" zone. Each machine has a secure password that it hands to the restic command locally when it backs up its data. The backup server run the restic http server, and the only secret it knows is the user passwords to access its API. The files it receives are encrypted and useless without the passwords that the various machines use.
From the backup server, I use rclone to copy the backups to the "cloud". I also take weekly backups to USB disks for disaster recovery.