My own personal web monitoring system, Alan Levine, sent me this tweet Friday:
@jimgroom what the ~ happened to https://t.co/sKXA0liG9y ?
— Alan has x-ed to @cogdog (@cogdog) September 8, 2016
Turns out ds106.club was down, and I’m pretty sure a quick reboot would have cured it. But it actually was pointing to a deeper issue I had been avoiding for some time now: my neglected Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances. I had (notice the past tense) two instances running on AWS for a couple of years now. Back in 2014 I spun up a Ghost blog on AWS (more on that in my next post) and in 2015, inspired by Tim Owen’s demo at the Indie Web Camp in Cambridge, I used it to host ds106.club—an OG Apache server for ~tilde spaces. That space has 32 accounts on it (maybe 25 of those actually have anything on them) for folks that want to re-live the 90s web publishing experience. I do think it will make for an interesting time machine experience for a project I hope to be working on this year (namely rebuilding a working 1990s computer lab/living room) so I want to keep the server running. Even more so, when I start a project like this, no matter how silly, and folks invest their time and energy, I feel it’s my obligation to be a good steward of their work.
Anyway, the issue I was having with my AWS instance is my server key pairs (encrypted login keys) were not working any more. The .pem file was borking and I couldn’t access the server beyond rebooting the instance. This is not the first time the AWS key pair setup has bit me in the ass, and as much as I love the idea that AWS’s EC2 represents in terms of virtual server management, the interface and usability is horrendous. As Tim noted, “It’s a perfect example of an interface designed for server admins by server admins.” There’s nothing intuitive about managing an AWS instance, and this was never made more apparent than when I went through the process of try to re-issue a new key pair. I had to detach the storage volume from the existing instance, then re-attach it to a temporary instance, then ssh in to mount the drive, then issue a new key pair (which didn’t work for me because of permissions issues) then detach drive and finally remount it on the old instance. Unnecessarily complicated.
At this point I knew I had to abandon AWS EC2 instances all together, so I decided to just download the home directory from the temporary instance with everyone’s files and rebuild it on Digital Ocean, and that’s what I did. Digital Ocean’s user experience and interface is akin to working in WordPress, whereas AWS is Drupal—to rekindle an old analogy. I installed a $5 month instance with Ubuntu 16.04.1 x64. It was awesome not having to work through the long list of pre-setup I went through the first time with AWS (listed here). The server booted in seconds and I could get right to updating packages, creating users, and installing Apache. As a quick note, when my access key failed on Digital Ocean I could easily get a root password for my server (that has made all the difference in the world for me!).
Whereas on AWS I was using an Amazon Linux AMI, on Digital Ocean I tried the latest available release of Ubuntu. Given this, there were a few things I had to work through. Installing Git worked cleanly with the tutorial for Ubuntu 14.04, so no problems there. The instructions for installing Apache and editing the httpd.conf file in the original tutorial where not applicable. As this resource notes:
httpd.conf: historically the main Apache2 configuration file, named after the httpd daemon. Now the file does not exist. In older versions of Ubuntu the file might be present, but empty, as all configuration options have been moved to the below referenced directories.
So I installed Apache2:
sudo apt install apache2
And then used this guide to enable userdir, which is what allows for the tilde spaces. I have to look into enabling PHP, but I’ll wait to see if John Johnston needs it 🙂 This guide worked and the server was setup, and I added some other goodies like Finger, Lynx, Tree, Irssi, Mutt, and Tmux.
The last step was copying all the directories from the old AWS server into the home directory of the new server and re-creating users, re-doing permissions, and distributing the new credentials and IP address. I still have to send details to a bunch of folks. But luckily, other than Alan, no one has been beating down my door. This is not surprising, but Alan and I have a lot in common in this regard. We take the management of communal web spaces seriously. No question it takes a whole lot of gardening to ensure these spaces stay around for a while, but I like that responsibility a lot—it motivates me during the times when I know digging into AWS key pairs is going to mean a long night of rebuilding. Especially when those long nights are when I tend to learn the most. Helping to garden the communal web that is ds106 for almost 6 years has been the most generative process I have ever been a part of, and when something gives you that much you have to keep giving back.
Well, it is a Good Thing for True Friends that UNCLE @JimGroom likes working in the computer garden plus you like the smell of Internet Dirt under your fingernails in the morning.
I need to send you your credentials Tina, cause you have quite the ~space:
http://ds106.club/~talkytina/
Your Big Fan and #1 Friend
Hi Jim,
Very exciting (I am not sure why, but I feel it!). THANKS
The new unix tools look as if they might be fun.
On php, personally I’d leave it out. there are plenty of places to play with that. What I enjoy about the tilde clubs (I had a totallynuclear.club place until that went) is playing with in limits. I even added own rule, no ftp, terminal only in my club. I don’t think this is a love of the retro. Perhaps a club should be like using a deliberately reduced palette.
I’d love to explore more the ways of collaboratively working across tilde spaces, hopefully someone will explain how to use Irssi. I could see a wee web segment of DS106 playing out in tilde land, we tried a little in prisoner106 but only scratched the surface…
Andrew Forgrave has been saying as much, and I am going to try and push to run an open version of ds106 at Coventry University (if they let me) from 90s internet culture. The whole class will be framed around using that moment and the development of the various protocols around the soon to emerge web we know. The nostalgia for the web that could have been now with some good articles on Gopher (https://www.minnpost.com/business/2016/08/rise-and-fall-gopher-protocol) makes me think it might be a lot of fun. I would think the tilde club would play a crucial role in this, may the home base for folks. So rather than a domain, a tilde space 😉 If this actually runs, I imagine we could frame the club in some interesting ways, part of my reason for making sure it is solid moving forward.
While everyone else shrugs or stays locked in Zuckerburg’s chamber, someone has to care about the open web. It might was well be us.
The funny thing was that the only reason I checked was because Bryan Alexander tweeted a link to a linguistic resource that is still updated from a ~ space at University of Michigan.
I agree with John, let’s keep the platform simple and html
Simple it is, and I love and deeply respect how you have consistently remained an enlightened, liberated voice for an open web. Open as in being there.
It is always fun when you are on a mission and you have to do a McGuyver with what you have or as we used to call it before that a Mission Impossible.
But when I looked for /~iamTalkyTina it did not show up, plus I looked for /~TalkyTina because sometimes they call me that, but where did it go, UNCLE Jim?
When you send out the info to peoples, please make sure I get mine for /~iamTalkyTina because I’m sure I got one when we were in The Village in 2015. #village106
@iamTalkyTina
http://ds106.club/~johnjohnston/users.html
shows me the way to
http://ds106.club/~talkytina/
We are case sensitive
Always case sensitive 🙂