My First Post! Moving Servers to Save $$$

I’m not too sure what I’m doing with this blog yet. I was thinking of using it to give me a resource to look at to help me remember coding stuff I have done, maybe. We’ll figure it out.

Anyway, I’m currently working on moving all my websites to this one. It’ll probably be a bit challenging due to this server only using ipv6. For the original domain, blog.sacko.dev, I used a CNAME DNS record to point to sacko.is-a-fullstack.dev; sacko.is-a-fullstack.dev has an AAAA DNS record pointing to this server’s IP address. Nothing seemed to work otherwise with Namecheap’s DNS since I couldn’t only have an AAAA or ipv6 record for a subdomain; it seemed to have wanted an A or ipv4 record. So I had to work with the DNS records like this:

blog.sacko.dev CNAME --> sacko.is-a-fullstack.dev AAAA --> server_ipv6_address

This website took a couple days to set up, too. I accidentally spent hours setting it up as an apache2 web server, and when everything started working, I forgot I needed nginx. So I had to do it all over again. I also had to do odd work-arounds due to this server only supporting ipv6, such as having to download files to my laptop and scp them into my server.

The main point of doing the server move is to save $3.50 a month on my server bill. Since I don’t get much traffic, it doesn’t really matter if I have a really small server. It will also be good for me to relearn how I set up all of my websites. I’d have to set up nginx server blocks for Flask, as well as some website I had automated scripts for updating it from GitHub as I was using it as the CMS for that website.

I also was going to try to make an article summarizer with a Raspberry Pi 4B I have at home, as I wanted to test the capabilities of a low-end device for text generation. I found that zephyr-7B 2Q with GPT4All was the best for me so far; it’s slow and barely seems to use the RAM probably because of the CPU bottlenecking it, but it does a good job in following prompt instructions. I may experiment more with it since GPT4All seems to have compatibility issues with newer GGUF models, or overclock my Pi and see what happens once I get some cooling on it.

Here’s some useful commands I learned for monitoring my Raspberry Pi.

//monitors CPU and RAM usage in a neat display
htop
//monitors temperature; refreshes every second
watch -n 1 vcgencmd measure_temp
// monitors cpu; refreshes 10 times a second
watch -n .1 vcgencmd measure_clock arm

That’s about all I got for now. I’ll try to post more about my technical adventures as time goes on.

The site is sort of ugly at the moment, but I’ll work on it when I’m feeling it.