Did you know that the ii News has been going for over 17 years? In the early years, it was constantly changing, from a custom PHP content management system that I hacked together to look like a Mac desktop (dang, I wish I had a screenshot of that) to NucleusCMS, and finally to WordPress. Originally, I hosted the site on my old Power Mac 7500, then a Grape iMac that Evan loaned me, then my Powerbook G4, then a Power Mac G3, then a Dell Windows PC, then a Mac mini, then the new Mac mini, then back to the old Mac mini…
One constant along the way has been Shaw Cable and DynDNS. From the very first, there has been a common thread: I hosted the web site with a computer running in my house, routing traffic from port 80 & 443 to that computer via the cable modem. Traffic gets to me through dynamic DNS. That might have continued forever except for one thing: ever since the nightmare we had with Shaw Cable in July & August 2018, it hasn’t been working right. I’ve worked around the issues or put up with them, but there’s been need of a change. The first issue is that for whatever reason, https://biickert.ca does not resolve on Bell’s mobile network. I can’t get to the website. I’ve called Shaw, I’ve called Bell, I’ve called Dyn. The other is that biickert.ca does not resolve from in our house. That’s right, I can be at home and can’t refer to the computer here. I hacked that by setting up a DNS server and custom rules on all the devices, but that has been troublesome.
So what’s coming? A linux server “on the cloud”, that’s what. I am in the process of setting up a Linode. That’s a virtual linux server in a Toronto data centre. So far, it’s been going as well as could be expected. The plan is to do the swap over this weekend, moving this site and the FFF to it. I will be able to disable dynamic DNS, because I will have a permanent address (saving me about as much money per year as the hosting costs). I think I will be able to get away with the smallest host size, which is only $5/month. Throw in another $2/month and I’d have automatic backups!
The hardest part still lies ahead, which is setting up encryption, but I have reason to be optimistic that it will work. There might be a hiccup during the switch over, but I’ll try to minimize it.
It’s a whole new era for the ii News.
