Continued to work on the website and mastodon server but managed some breakthroughs late last week. My challenge was self-hosting both sites, but from a single internal internet connection. This is much more challenging than it would appear, since there are two such services and only a single connection. The solution, after a bit of research was to configure a reverse proxy, which itself was relatively easy to do.
However, these days sites need SSL certificates, and all the tutorials and documentation references either how to secure a specific site, or the proxy server, but not how to blend them together seamlessly – or at least I could not find a single clean tutorial. The general approach is to secure with SSL the reverse proxy system, which receives the encrypted traffic, and then routes it to the internal connection without needing encryption (since its internal at that point). For WordPress, that isn’t too difficult – the software can run without SSL without issue. Mastodon is much more challenging however, since it assumes SSL in all the documentation. To the end user, all sites and traffic appear to be https without issue, and all traffic is secure. It’s only the background infrastructure that is complex.
To add to the complexity, I wanted to keep my existing site operational as much as possible, make sure I had a viable backup to restore with, and generate the SSL certificates (which require the new site to be active). As a result, if you had visited the sites, you would likely have seen spotty access for the last several days.
Fortunately, after about 24 hours of work, I managed to get a stable configuration. I have the WordPress site running without SSL, and Mastodon running without SSL, while the front-line Reverse Proxy is running SSL (and securing all traffic), along with properly routing all requests to the proper locations. To my awareness, I have no lingering errors or pathing problems – everything is functional.
Even better, the restore this time ran much better than expected, and far better than the prior tool I used in my last migration. The restore wasn’t fast – I have a lot of data and files that have built up over the years. But it did finish, and when I reconnected the following day, everything was in place, working, and without issues.
Now I can let the dust settle, and return to just adding content, while both sites hopefully run without issue. Join the conversation with some comments, or join us on Mastodon if you wish, everything should be working – though let me know if you spot any broken links still.
https://www.halfling13.com
https://social.halfling13.com
