I’ve been neglecting the Mastodon instances at both social.ds106.us and reclaim.rocks. But recently there have been some critical updates, and with the state of security on the web I figured it was time to be a good host. So I dove in with a little bit of trepidation because these are both running in Docker containers.
I know just enough about Docker to be dangerous. The layers of abstraction can quickly become vertiginous. Oftentimes mid-way through an upgrade I go running to Taylor Jadin for help—our resident Docker expert.
This time was no different than the others, but rather than leaning on Taylor when a Mastodon update went sideways, I turned to ChatGPT to see how far it could get me. Turns out for upgrading social.ds106.us it was very effective. I’m linking to the ds106.social Mastodon upgrade chat for future reference if needed, and I also have a summary document of the process to remind me of what the machine told me to do.
Feeling good, I then did the same thing for Reclaim’s official Mastodon instance reclaim.rocks. This upgrade was not as smooth, and I had to wrestle with ChatGPT to get this thing up and running after an hour. Taylor has a specific build we are using for our Mastodon, but ChatGPT went off script so now it’s using an official image and running the SSL certificate through Cloudflare. Once again I’m linking to the ChatGPT back and forth for reclaim.rocks’ Mastodon upgrade, so I can remember what I did. I also asked the machine for a summary document so I have a quick overview of what was done. I find the chats are too long and tedious to go back through, so a broader summary of what was changed can be more easily referenced if I need to change something back.
Coming off two wins thanks to ChatGPT, I pushed for yet another critical update for my personal PeerTube instance bava.tv. This also went pretty smoothly as the chat underscores, and once again I had a summary drawn up for the next time I work on this.
So, I did three important upgrades for self-hosted open source apps that can power the infrastructure of an institution with a little help from my AI friend. What’s more, even with the hang-up with reclaim.rocks it was probably one-third the time it would usually take. That’s not bad, and if you are worried about running these apps or taking control of your own infrastructure it is increasingly getting easier to do just that—take it from a hack like me.
In fact, this might be the easiest upgrade post I ever wrote, with ChatGPT doing all the summarizing of the process, as well as recording useful commands that I used to get it all working. The whole process of copying and pasting commands from the machine into my terminal and finding they work is pretty magic. A lot of people are celebrating the power of these tools for creating code, something I know nothing about just yet. But I am finding them fairly useful in helping “hone” my lackluster sysadmin powers.
I can’t argue with the approach, as the usual route would be a tons of web searching and filtering through multiple suggestions, trying and iterating. It’s close to the same that ChatGPT is maybe distilling the top suggestions, not perfect and follow blindly, just a way of doing the solution iterating.
My all concern is how future sys admins will be able to interpret, try results, and do this iteration. You gotta have some experience to do the back and forth, like how do the future Taylors get to that level?
I’m not so worried about the Chris and Taylor’s of the world because they seem to like this stuff and dig in in ways that I will not, ultimately. What I do think this provides some relief to Chris or Taylor so they can focus on something other than my updating of bava.tv. Not sure AI is the either/or it is often made out to be.