For the curious: the system that hosts this website

I’ve been hosting my own servers for many years now, gradually extending and improving the setup. The main reason for running my own stuff is to learn: so many things can, and will, go wrong. For years I’ve been arguing that we shouldn’t be programming distributed systems, but composing them — gluing pieces of software, hardware, and actual machines together into a working whole. That shifts the emphasis onto the glue: the scripts, the cron jobs, and whatnot. It also means being able to switch things off and, more importantly, back on again — remotely. I’ll keep adding material here, hopefully inspiring others to take similar steps, and to avoid the mistakes I made.

1. System overview
2. Toward robust solutions
3. About security
4. A tough one: cloning a server