New Blog, New Toys

Welcome to the shiny, new Pepperland blog! Fresh off of my stint with Blogger, I decided to put some of my home networking attention toward hosting my own content. I was originally intending on using Wordpress, but then I discovered the absolutely gorgeous Ghost – and upon learning it is based on Markdown, I was immediately sold. (Markdown has been a large part of my day job as of late, writing user documentation and tutorials on the software that my company develops.)

Thus, the plans started to take shape on how to go about hosting this myself. Thanks to the annual Presidents' Day sale over at You-Do-It Electronics, I picked up a bevy of Raspberry Pi systems, and bought a four-slot Bramble Box to house them in. In future blog posts I'll write about the intended function of each of them, as well as a review of the Bramble Box itself in the coming weeks.

Ghost was remarkably easy to install, thanks to the fine folks over at Ghost Pi. I had Ghost up and running within 45 minutes, with no miscues or further research required – everything just worked as described.

Next up I took another of the Pis and installed nginx on it. For those not in the know, nginx is a web server/proxy, and my use of it falls into the latter category. The nginx pi will be (or is, presuming you're reading this blog post) on the front lines of my network, forwarding all inbound HTTP/HTTPS requests to the respective machines on my network. It's a clever reverse proxy, terminating TLS and finding the appropriate back-end system to proxy toward. What this means is that all requests for blog.pepperland.cloud will arrive at the same public IP address as several other websites that I'm hosting at home, and nginx fans them out to the correct devices on the back end. (Spoiler alert: I've got more websites in the works...)

As I write this, the entire setup is sitting on my desk at the office. Here's what it looks like:

By the time you read this, though, it'll be in my DMZ and serving up pages to the world. (In this picture, the top system is running nginx and the one below it is running Ghost. Except as you can see nothing is actually plugged into power, so really nothing in this picture is running at all.)

The formation of the DMZ moves me one step closer to the IP readdressing scheme that I mentioned back in the "old days" on my former blog site. This will all be discussed in due time.