Downtime
--------

As Dan observed (https://danq.me/2025/08/29/27143/) the textplain.blog vanished
from the Internet for a few hours today. Turns out that even a semi-static blog
like this one can go down if, y'know, the VPS it's hosted on goes belly-up:

> Last night, an undermaintained VPS of mine went kaput.
>
> The data’s all fine, and most of the services I was running on it came back
> up in new homes without difficulty, but just a handful of things are still
> down, including textplain.blog and freedeedpoll.org.uk, ugh.
>
> Not the best start to a Friday when I’ve got a backlog of day-job work to do.

I'm not sure WHY the server stopped booting. It always landed in the UEFI shell
and claimed it didn't have any hard drives, and neither the hypervisor nor BIOS
could tell it otherwise. The QEMU raw hard drive image itself was fine: I could
mount the drive into a fresh virtual machine and it worked perfectly (so that's
exactly what I did in order to rescue the data).

But I didn't just want to create a new VM exactly like the one it replaced. For
a start, the old machine was still sitting on Debian 11 and was generally messy
and under-maintained. Plus: running this one tiny PHP application wasn't a good
use of the basic reverse proxy I WANTED to be maiaining. So now it's Dockerised
and sitting behind the new proxy (now powered by Caddy) and the entire stack is
much cleaner and happier.

I do find myself wondering if this SHOULD have been a precompiled & static site
in the first place, though. Then it could be, for example, hosted by GitHub and
there'd be one fewer thing for me to think about. Maybe for a future iteration?

For now, though, I've got OTHER sites to rescue and repair!

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This post appeared on https://textplain.blog/