I bought thod.dev a while back because I wanted a slightly shorter domain to play with than the one you’re at. In light of what’s happening in the US I’m also thinking about starting to get onto the self hosting train. These are my baby steps in that direction.

After browsing european-alternatives.eu and reddit a bit I settled on a €4 a month VPS from netcup to start.

I set up the DNS entries in Cloudfare. Not quite an EU alternative but baby steps. Then I Installed caddy. It took me a while to understand how to configure caddy through systemctl but it’s here if you need it here. Here’s my tiny cheatsheet for caddy:

My caddyfile is a series of entries like this, they just direct subdomains to internal docker images or servers. Note that it’s much easier to setup subdomains i.e git.thod.dev than it is to do something like thod.dev/git/*.

git.thod.dev {
  import logging
  reverse_proxy localhost:3000
}

music.thod.dev {
  import logging
  reverse_proxy localhost:4533
}

Interesting side note: Caddy handles getting TLS certs and https fr you pretty well! The one slightly unexpected side effect of this is that the moment you get a cert issued (which caddy does automatically) for a subdomain, that will become a matter of public record. There are many many bots configured to automatically start sniffing around for vulnerabilities on your server, here’s a snippet of some requests I got within minutes of setting up a new subdomain:

GET /@vite/env HTTP/1.1
GET /actuator/env HTTP/1.1
GET /server HTTP/1.1
GET /.vscode/sftp.json HTTP/1.1
GET /about HTTP/1.1
GET /debug/default/view?panel=config HTTP/1.1
GET /v2/_catalog HTTP/1.1
GET /ecp/Current/exporttool/microsoft.exchange.ediscovery.exporttool.application HTTP/1.1
GET /server-status HTTP/1.1
GET /login.action HTTP/1.1
GET /_all_dbs HTTP/1.1
GET /.DS_Store HTTP/1.1
GET /.env HTTP/1.1
GET /.git/config HTTP/1.1
GET /s/3313e22343e28363e2838313/_/;/META-INF/maven/com.atlassian.jira/jira-webapp-dist/pom.properties HTTP/1.1
GET /config.json HTTP/1.1
GET /telescope/requests HTTP/1.1
GET /info.php HTTP/1.1
GET /?rest_route=/wp/v2/users/ HTTP/1.1

So far I don’t have any data/passwords/private keys/etc on this server that I would particularly mind losing or having stolen. Before changing that I think I’ll need to do a thorough security review of this box.

Experiments so far:

Mirror of this site @ thod.dev

This is just a test really, I doubt I’ll ever fully move from thomashodson.com fully to thod.dev but maybe one day!

Miniflux @ miniflux.thod.dev

I still need to setup some kind of action to rebuild this mirror.

For a few years now I’ve paid for theoldreader as an rss reader but lately I wanted some kind of API to access my lists of read and unread posts and couldn’t really find it from theoldreader, so I’m starting to switch over to a self hosted miniflux, so far so good!

Gitea @ git.thod.dev

I’ve put up a gitea instance and mirrored a couple repos from github. Haven’t quite decided how to use this yet!

Navidrome @ music.thod.dev

I’ve uploaded various music that I have locally from bandcamp and such to a navidrome instance.

Tiny Webservers

Since I have this server I seems like a good time to play with so more dynamic stuff. My first foray into that is a tiny rust webserver hosted at api.thod.dev/tiny_servers/single_threaded. It just returns a json response telling you how many times this endpoint has been hit since the last time I rebooted it!

Try it out with curl -vvv https://api.thod.dev/tiny_servers/single_threaded and the webserver code is here.