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DigitalOcean server re-configuration
Jun 12, 2018
2 minutes read

So, you should finally be able to see this website on pretty much all domain names owned by me. As you can see, it’s been three months since I actually started to build this site, but a lot has gone on in my life (both work and personally) in that timeframe, so the rollout has been delayed. However, I’ve now completed the rollout, which was a lot more involved than I thought.

I had a few Droplets on DigitalOcean that were doing nothing and costing me money, so I decided to back them up the lazy man’s way: tar the entire file system, and then download the result. This worked suprisingly well; I was able to complete the whole job in a few hours.

Then, the mess of my DNS needed to be changed. Besides things such as Exchange-required records and those for Keybase, there were a wide range for old, unused websites and things such as a failed OpenID experment. You’ll now see if you dig that there are now two A records for each domain - just the root domain and a wildcard one.

I realised that my ‘main’ droplet was too far gone so it got the treatment as above. I then created a new Droplet, and after much manual fiddling around, got it to be used to host this Hugo blog by adjusting a post-receive hook for git.

Finally, I thought this was a good time to implement wildcard certificates from Let’s Encrypt that was more difficult than I expected - the dns-digitalocean plugin isn’t supported on Debian; somehow I got it working and here we are. I do still have to fix NGiИX’s redirection from HTTP, however.

Time to take a breath, end my lunch break and get back to work. This was both easier and more difficult than I thought; I may add some more information later on this or even backdate some blog posts from when I was away.


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