colorfield.space has been down a lot. I finally decided to
dig around and see what was going on. Steps:
1. Find it on my local network and ssh to the ip address.
This worked fine. I was also able to hit it with gopher
requests and get data back. The pi was running and our
gopher server was up. The pi was likely not the issue.
2. Remember the password to the network gateway and log in
to the admin pannel to check on the port forwarding
The port forwarding was set correctly and the device
was clearly seen by the router.
3. Check on the ip address dns servers are giving to the
host (colorfield.space)
Bingo! I was getting the wrong ip address back. I use
dynamic dns through my registrar. My isp rarely changed
our ip, so I always just updated it manually. It seems
to be happening with some frequency now. So, I finally,
after many years (7ish?) set up a script to refresh the
dynamic dns to whatever ip the pi has at the time and
set it on a cron job every twelve hours. Done!
As a result of #3 the server should be regularly reachable
now. WHich is nice. I am feeling more attached again to the
idea of a small, low power (ish) device in my home serving
things up as needed. I am ssh'd in to the server now, and
am typing in the editor I wrote (sled) and really enjoying
the experience (though I want to upgrade the syntax
highlighting from simple keywords to being able to regex
highlight, so that I can highlight html and markdown more
easily). I did, however, stop using the shell I wrote. At
least for now. I just really use job control a lot in my
computer workflow(s) and cannot seem to get it to work. So
for now it is back to bash.
## Open to residents
Now that the server has a bit more stability and
availability: we are open to requests to join up here. We
updated some of our gopher pages to make that more clear.
If you think you could use a new gopher home and would
actually use it, you are definitely welcome. Hit the server
root with your gopher client and you'll find details on how
to go about it.
