[8:43 AM] francois: their new free offering allows 18 hours of up time per day
[8:43 AM] patrick: yes
[8:44 AM] patrick: but that's not good enough for an actual website, totally fine for prototyping or your own pet projects.
[8:44 AM] francois: their $7/month plan seems pretty reasonable though.
[8:44 AM] patrick: It would be nice if you could schedule it though.
[8:45 AM] patrick: yes, $7 a month does seem ok for an app.. but then... for just $3 more you can send as much email as you like, have a gig of ram, disk space, etc. etc.
[8:45 AM] patrick: (and a background worker)
[8:45 AM] patrick: it really doesn't make sense to stick around any more I think...
[8:46 AM] francois: true, you really do get a lot for $10/month at DO.
[8:46 AM] patrick: I just need to understand Email a bit more (specifically if I run several apps I don't quite understand where email gets sent from, do you just specify a from header and your spf record per domain points to the right place?) .. anyway, lots to learn
[8:47 AM] patrick: yes, I'm already paying $110 a year for a site5 website, so I might just move the whole lot to DO.
[8:47 AM] francois: for email I use sendgrid
[8:47 AM] patrick: really?
[8:47 AM] patrick: why?
[8:47 AM] patrick: (once you're running your own box at least)
[8:47 AM] francois: yes, i have a $10/month account with them that gives me something like 40,000 emails per month. So I use that one account on a ton of websites that I run.
[8:47 AM] francois: that way I donât have to worry about email configuration, backup smtp server, etc.
[8:48 AM] patrick: hmmmmm, I will have to do my research :wink: "Backup smtp server" you say :wink:
[8:48 AM] patrick: these words, they're strange to me.
[8:48 AM] patrick: :smile:
[8:49 AM] patrick: (but seriously, why would you need a backup? If your smtp server is down you're probably rebooting your machine at that point aren't you?)
[8:49 AM] francois: for incoming email
[8:49 AM] patrick: aaaah,
[8:50 AM] patrick: right - I don't care about incoming.
[8:50 AM] francois: right.
[8:50 AM] francois: youâd just use local sendmail
[8:50 AM] patrick: I have a grandfathered google apps
[8:50 AM] francois: to sent outgoing email?
[8:50 AM] patrick: no, I will use local sendmail (or postfix or exim - not sure yet, but sendmail sounds the trickiest beast)
[8:51 AM] patrick: I use google apps for incoming email.
[8:51 AM] patrick: my mx record points to google.
[8:51 AM] francois: gotcha.
[8:51 AM] patrick: so I can read everything in gmail.
[8:52 AM] francois: that is one area that iâve run into pain with in the past. Sendmail was (might still be) a pain to configure correctly
[8:53 AM] patrick: yeah, I'll have to do an audit and see what to keep. I might end up just moving snowpool to DO and keeping my site5 for my blog etc... and moving things I really don't care about onto my cloudatcost box.
[8:53 AM] patrick: good times.
[8:53 AM] patrick: yeah, mail is the thing which makes me most nervous.
[8:54 AM] patrick: I mean other things you can recover from fairly easily, but a whole bunch of spam getting out somehow isn't going to do your ratings any favours.
[8:54 AM] francois: or email not getting delivered
[8:54 AM] patrick: yeah, I do like google for that stuff :wink:
[8:55 AM] francois: Iâve encountered that issue with misconfigured sendmail in the pastâ¦where email would stop going out and just get queued up.
[8:55 AM] patrick: oh weird.
[8:55 AM] francois: and cases where other servers didnât like emails from âmy server"
[8:55 AM] patrick: so it had been working but then stopped?
[8:55 AM] francois: yup
[8:55 AM] patrick: that's not cool.
[8:55 AM] patrick: you were using SPF records 'n all that ?
[8:56 AM] patrick: What a pain.. what would make someone not like your server?
[8:56 AM] francois: this goes back a long time (over 5 years ago) ...
[8:56 AM] patrick: right.
[8:56 AM] francois: so i donât recall all the specifics of what it turned out to be.
[8:57 AM] francois: i just recall that I ran into various issues that required investigating and troubleshooting over the period of time that I did it.
[8:57 AM] patrick: how annoying. At least for me it's really just hobby stuff so it doesn't really matter tooooo much. But I can see why you'd use sendgrid for your app etc.
[8:57 AM] francois: and when sendgrid came out and offered their free tier (not sure it that is still available??) I jumped on that and removed my problems.
[8:58 AM] francois: iâve since upgraded to a $10/month account once I started using it across all the rails apps that I host. (edited)
[8:59 AM] francois: for webserver I use nginx with passenger
[8:59 AM] francois: passenger works well and allows you to run different apps on differing versions of ruby.
[9:04 AM] patrick: yip, I'm used to apache + passenger, but all the cool kids seem to use nginx.
[9:04 AM] francois: apache + passenger works great too
[9:04 AM] patrick: just a bit more memory intensive?
[9:04 AM] francois: nginx is apparently more performant then apache.
[9:05 AM] francois: but i donât think that would make much diff in reality unless you were running a very busy site.
[9:05 AM] patrick: yes exactly what I was thinking.
[9:05 AM] patrick: ok, might sit down this weekend and spin up a box and try get a rails app onto it and sending email.
[9:05 AM] patrick: That'll give me something to do :wink:
[9:06 AM] patrick: Mind you, could always use google's SMTP for a while too as @paul pointed out a while back (and I'm using that on my raspberry pi - works fine)
[9:06 AM] francois: yup that is also another good free option.
[9:06 AM] patrick: Do you use the brightbox ppa for ruby?
[9:07 AM] patrick: Yeah, it is a good solution, what I don't know is what the cutoff is for google's smtp (edited)
[9:07 AM] francois: I donât know what brightbox ppa is
[9:07 AM] patrick: I mean the situation you don't want is email going into a black hole.
[9:07 AM] patrick: https://launchpad.net/~brightbox/+archive/ubuntu/ruby-ng Next generation Ubuntu pacakages for Ruby 2.2, 2.1, 2.0 1.9.3 and 1.8 EE. See https://www.brightbox.com/docs/ruby/ubuntu/ for more details. This PPA no longer includes Phusion Passenger packages, and NGINX packages with Passenger support. See https://launchpad.net/~brightbox/+archive/ubuntu/passenger-legacy Discussion list here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/brightbox-ruby-ubuntu-packaging https://www.brightbox.com
[9:08 AM] patrick: instead of using rvm , rbenv etc.
[9:08 AM] patrick: you use this ppa and install a system ruby
[9:08 AM] patrick: definitely what I plan on doing at the moment.
[9:08 AM] francois: I compiled system ruby (2.2.2) and then I use rvm to manage all the other different rubies i need.
[9:09 AM] patrick: right - seems similar enough then.
[9:09 AM] francois: i just chose rvm because I was already familiar with it.
[9:09 AM] patrick: right - and you have a deployer user (or similar) and you install rvm for that user?
[9:10 AM] francois: correct (deploy user) and rvm is installed for that user.
[9:10 AM] patrick: right.
[9:10 AM] patrick: And security updates, did you install one of the auto updating packages, or how do you manage that process?
[9:11 AM] patrick: or just apt-get update?
[9:11 AM] francois: once a week I do the apt-get update and apt-get upgrade
[9:11 AM] patrick: right.
[9:11 AM] francois: and then I also check security on things that Iâve compiled myself (eg like nginx or passenger)
[9:12 AM] patrick: At the point you install, or you do some kind of system audit?
[9:12 AM] patrick: or you just go through the configuration and turn off things which need turning off.
[9:12 AM] francois: I just checked to make sure there were no surprise opened ports
[9:12 AM] francois: i disable password login and only allow ssh-keys
[9:12 AM] patrick: seems like if you only allow traffic in on 80, 443 and your secret ssh port, disallow password access
[9:13 AM] patrick: yeah exactly.
[9:13 AM] francois: i left ssh on default port, didnât bother changing that.
[9:13 AM] patrick: failtoban?
[9:13 AM] francois: no i havenât installed that.
[9:13 AM] patrick: have you heard of port knocking?
[9:14 AM] patrick: :simple_smile:
[9:14 AM] francois: no i donât know that term
[9:14 AM] patrick: so cool.
[9:14 AM] patrick: You set it up with some sort of pinging sequence (I believe)
[9:14 AM] patrick: and the server will then open up a port.
[9:14 AM] patrick: so cool.,
[9:14 AM] patrick: just like bilbo at the mountain.
[9:14 AM] francois: oh i just read it, iâve seen that used on other peopleâs systemsâ¦but not using anything like that on my server.
[9:15 AM] francois: i use backup gem to handle backups
[9:15 AM] francois: i take db snapshots every hour and send those to s3
[9:15 AM] patrick: right - and system monitoring
[9:15 AM] patrick: just newrelic?
[9:15 AM] francois: along with any user uploaded content that isnât already stored on s3.
[9:15 AM] patrick: or nagios or similar?
[9:15 AM] francois: i use pingdom for system monitoring
[9:15 AM] francois: i use monit to monitor and restart processes
[9:16 AM] patrick: right - that's the one bit I'm not that familiar with (monit)
[9:16 AM] francois: there are other options too like âgod'
[9:16 AM] francois: but again i was already familiar with monit, its been around a looong time.
[9:16 AM] patrick: This is more for if apache or workers crash and you need to restart them?
[9:16 AM] francois: memcached, redis, etc.
[9:16 AM] francois: well, actually not redis
[9:17 AM] francois: actually am just using it for sidekiq on this latest server
[9:17 AM] patrick: I don't suppose you know of a good tutorial for that stuff do you? Happy to google but if you know of something I'd be keen.
[9:17 AM] francois: for using monit?
[9:17 AM] patrick: yip
[9:18 AM] patrick: this is where I fall down with self hosting, the known unknowns! Paranoia sets in.
[9:18 AM] francois: offhand noâ¦but when you get to that point feel free to fire any questions my way.
[9:18 AM] patrick: ok thanks.
[9:18 AM] patrick: yeah, I've been meaning to do this for a while, ever since the heroku price changes were flagged.
[9:18 AM] francois: and i use capistrano for deployments
[9:18 AM] patrick: worst comes to the worst I can always high tail it back to heroku.
[9:19 AM] patrick: yes, like capistrano
[9:19 AM] patrick: 2 or 3?
[9:19 AM] francois: 3
[9:19 AM] francois: though Iâm still using 2 for a couple of older projects.
[9:19 AM] francois: but like2have is on cap 3.
[9:19 AM] patrick: right, 2 was more optimised for rails specifically wasn't it?
[9:20 AM] francois: Iâm not sure tbh. 3 was just as easy to make happy with rails.
[9:20 AM] francois: i think the biggest change with 3 in my case was that I needed to add a bunch of require statements in the Capfile itself
[9:20 AM] patrick: oh cool :simple_smile:
[9:20 AM] patrick: right.
[9:20 AM] francois: eg
[9:20 AM] francois: require 'capistrano/deploy' require 'capistrano/rvm' require 'capistrano/rails' require "whenever/capistrano"
[9:21 AM] patrick: that stuff I'm confident there will be good tutorials for.
[9:21 AM] patrick: whenever? Scheduler is it? (edited)
[9:21 AM] francois: it creates entries in crontab for you
Page created on 6 Jun 2020