You are in my house right now. What do you think?
Over the weekend, I migrated my blog from my hosted server with GoDaddy to a server sitting in my guest bedroom. The process should have been easier than I made it out to be and that was just because of a technical detail that took a little bit to remember.
When you have a web server that is accessible from inside your network and outside your network, you think would want to make the connections to that server consistent, just to simplify everything. So, you do the port forwarding on your router to direct web traffic to your web server and you point the DNS to the external IP of your router. Everything goes through the router.
This is how it works for the outside world, but it doesn’t work the same for your internal network. It’s not only inefficient, but practically non-functional for an internal computer to route to an external address only to come back around and get routed to an internal address. It’s like going to the bathroom by going outside, then back in through the front door every time instead of just walking across the house.
To solve this, you need the concept of external DNS and internal DNS. If you are inside the network, your computer resolves the addresses as internal IP addresses, and if you’re outside the network, you get external IP addresses. Because I use a pi-hole as my DNS and DHCP server internally, this meant I had to modify the HOSTS file on the pi-hole to override any DNS requests for my web sites I hosted inside my network.
Now that my web server is up and running, I still have one more month to migrate my email server off the old server to my house. Then my GoDaddy server will expire and I’ll be all on my own.
Frontier has been less than stellar during the migration, but the mistakes weren’t too egregious. The first issue happened a week before my new install. I woke up and my internet was off. I called up tech support and tried to resolve the issue. After a little while of no progress, I mentioned that I suspected this had to do with my new service order and the disconnection of the old service.
That led the conversion in a different path, which ended up in Accounts, who said everything is fine, and then was sent back to tech support who finally put the pieces together and determined that when my new circuit was provisioned, the old one was deactivated. Although I couldn’t have predicted that exactly, I had the sales rep put notes in the order saying that the old circuit was to remain active until the new one was installed. No one reads notes. I should have known that. After two hours on the phone, I had Internet again.
The day of the install, I woke up and I had no internet. Of course. This one I blamed myself for. I had an opportunity to set my deactivation date for a day later than the new install date and I didn’t take it. Of course the note saying not to turn off the old circuit until the new one was live doesn’t matter to an automated system that says, deactivation date is xx/xx/xxxx. So I just went without Internet until the tech showed up.
The install went fairly smoothly. At first, I was happy that I got to keep my old router, which meant I didn’t have to do any reconfiguration, but our initial tests kept showing my upload speed capped at 100mbps instead of the 500 I was supposed to get. We eventually swapped the router out for a new one and that solved the problem. I was surprised that the tech said upload speed is managed by the router. Makes me think that could be hacked in some way.
And in the end, I did have to reconfigure the router and of course, at one point I had two DHCP servers running on the network, which screwed up my IP cameras, and my pi-hole was bypassed, so I got all the browser ads. But eventually it all came back into order and things were normal again.
For what it’s worth, I honestly can’t tell the difference between 100 and 500mbps. I haven’t really done a lot of downloading and I don’t do a lot of video streaming, and I’m only one person, so maybe I wouldn’t be able to tell. But the speed is supposedly there.
Getting Your Due
I mentioned in a previous post about a blogger who had posted something that didn’t really sit right with me. When I went to confirm some details in that prior post, I saw that I used this post’s title in that post. So, I guess I still have the same issues.
In the previous post, I was saying how the entrepreneurial lifestyle isn’t for everyone, and certainly not me. Aside from the level of effort it takes to start it up and keep it going, I also have significant issues with a practice I have been seeing more frequently. That practice is the monetization of information. One blog that I follow has reviews on random products that are interesting. Recently, that blogger started linking to those products using affiliate links so they get a slight reimbursement for their referrals. That was never the case before. And this other blogger recently made a post expressing the same thing, that he needs to start using affiliate links whenever he is giving advice or recommendations.
This bothers me for so many reasons. First and foremost is the WIIFM aspect (What’s In It For Me?). WIIFM isn’t always bad, but when the only thing you are interested in is money, I think it is. Why should someone promote another’s website/product/service? Well, you could because you want to see the company succeed or because you want your readers to benefit from a great product/service. Or, somewhat selfishly, you want the company to stay in business because you use that company too and you need them to stick around. Or, as I see these affiliate links, you don’t particularly care about the company or your readers and just want some money.
Affiliate links are a scourge on the Internet. Once you start down that path, it’s a very short walk until you get to entire websites that trick people who have misspelled a domain name. What “entrepreneur” had the idea of “Oh you misspelled macys.com as macies.com. Here’s a link to the real site you were looking for. By the way, anything you purchase after clicking on that link will give me a small payout. It won’t affect anything you do, but it’s just a way for you to pay me back for this helpful site I created to correct your misspelling. You’re welcome.”
Along with the WIIFM issue is the viewpoint that information is not free. Something like “I could tell you what you want to know, but I need a small payment first.” Some people could argue that it’s a fair exchange. The information is there for free if you can find it, but if you want a shortcut over the bridge, you need to pay the toll operator. It sounds like a “victim of success” complaint. You want to be an authority, but once you are an authority, you’re in too much demand and so you have to employ discouragements.
Before I make this too long of a rant, here’s an example of linking to something just because you want to:
This Kickstarter is a book of comics. It’s organized by Matt Bors, who is a comic writer I’ve followed for quite a while. He went to a paid website and let his personal website die, and I didn’t follow him to his new home. However, I try to support him when I can, and this is one of those times. If you like to get world perspectives through visual media, like comics and illustrations, this book would suit you well.