Between vacation, travel, and AI Maddeness I’ve fallen into a bit of a hole. Sometimes disappearing down a hole is good for the soul, but it’s time to work my way back onto the blog with an old school tech update.
I’ve been running into issues on my self-hosted instance of PeerTube at bava.tv with live streaming as well as offloading videos to Digital Ocean’s S3 storage. My PeerTube instance is running in a Docker container, so sometimes I get timid when it comes to updating. Taylor and I recently brought my instance up to 7.1 (or thereabouts) and there where some change log issues with how the videos storage folder was named that meant we needed to update paths and directory names in the production.yaml file. That was all done and videos loaded, but concomitant with that update there were issues with videos offloading to Digital Ocean’s Spaces as well as live streaming through bava.tv.
Sometimes you assume things are related—especially with a recent upgrade—but that’s not always the case. Turns out the video offloading issues was a problem with the Digital Ocean API key for the S3 bucket, so after creating a new key that was fixed easily enough.
However the streaming issue on bava.tv persisted, so I used the Docker upgrade commands to update my instance and streaming works again. I do love it when Docker upgrades just work, it reminds my why that technology can be so awesome.
I have to admit that part of my digging in here was inspired by a conversation with Andy Rush about a presentation we are considering (we need to loop in Taylor) about “A Network of Your Own” or what it means to use various peer-to-peer and federated tools to decamp from soul-sucking platforms. Andy is hosting his PeerTube instance through FediHost, which saves him some of the anxiety of Docker upgrades and path re-writes that I’m able to lean on Taylor for.
Managing some of these federated tools in Reclaim Cloud is work, and while you get all the bells and whistles of PeerTube on Reclaim’s Cloud like multi-thread encoding, live streaming, cheaper storage, etc., you have to be willing to own it and pay a bit more. Tim and I have explored Cloudron in the past, and they do a good job of making those tools available at a reasonable price.
Simple fact is, self-hosting federated tools in the cloud are still not dead simple or as cheap as cPanel’s shared hosting (although I think we (Taylor) figured this out for Ghost on Reclaim Cloud), it requires a bit of work and that you pay-per-app, which is a different model than most folks are used to. I look forward to talking about all this and much more with Andy and Taylor at Reclaim Open.
Oh yeah, Reclaim open, I need to blog that gem of an online conference coming soon!
Always happy to inspire. I cracked some of the code that I mentioned in our conversation, so I’ll be sharing those options soon, and whatever happens between now and Reclaim Open!