skysurfer.media

Technical

Technical Specs

This site is made possible through the networking of several machines, including phones, drones, and a variety of cameras –
The main server is provided by OVH Cloud US and located in Hillsboro, Oregon at one of the most secure data centers in the world, near Pacific City where a major fiber optic cable goes into the ocean, and not too far from my home base in Corvallis. Downtime should be nill, and speeds are very fast, making 24 hour video streaming feasible.
There are even better plans now available in other locations…
This VPS provider is simply the best, in my opinion.

  • 16 core AMD EPYC-Milan Processor
  • 16G RAM
  • 160G NVMe disk
  • Unlimited cloud storage provided by Cloudflare R2
  • Custom Arch Linux OS
    • Postfix, Dovecot, Roundcube – email
    • Immich – replacement for Google Photos
    • WordPress – You Are Here
    • Jellyfin – live media (not public)
    • Tunarr, MediaMTX, GStreamer, v4l2, VLC – streaming (coming soon)
Technical Posts
  • Remove Unapproved
    Now that my solution for auto deleting WordPress comments has been tested for a couple of weeks, this post is to share the code. This will probably be merged with other shared configurations on a dedicated page in the future. The Problem: Automated bots don’t respect robots.txt and spammers find ways of bypassing spam lists.… Read more: Remove Unapproved
  • Upgrade Notes
    Finally, the image server is back online. This was by far the worst update yet… First, it was postgresql which underwent a major version change which happens every 5 years. This involved breaking changes and rendered the image database useless until properly migrated. Big learning curve. Then, there was a necessary extension which became flagged… Read more: Upgrade Notes
  • Upgrade Downgrade
    I knew it wouldn’t last long. The downgrade to make postgresql work and get immich back online has failed yet again with a dependancy of postgresql being upgraded… so the image server is back offline and the greuling upgrade of postgres is unavoidable… I wish I had time to delve into it today, but it’ll… Read more: Upgrade Downgrade
  • Uptime Downtime
    It’s been a crazy week for time, never mind the fact time is fluid and flexible. People have always observed time, but modern society obsesses on minutes and seconds being in sync ever since railroad time… then there’s Daylight Savings Time. Last weekend, it was time to Fall back an hour. For whatever reason, some… Read more: Uptime Downtime
  • Bluesky Above
    It may be that my quest for a microblogging engine will be as frustrating as the image server was to get working. Unfortunately, while Bluesky (bsky.app) is prettymuch everything I could want, in its current state of development there’s no way to self host a top level domain, only option is to masquerade as one… Read more: Bluesky Above
  • Almost live
    Time is not linear. One knows this from dealing with death and dying. But in terms of a server and live video, time becomes uprooted, almost implied instead of defined. Streams have no specific beginning, no standard size or speed, and the data doesn’t even have to be audio visual. The possibilities are endless, but… Read more: Almost live
  • Bluesky Coming
    A brief progress report. Times are changing and much has happened here at skysurfer.media – for one, the migration to a new server is complete! I now boast almost 2Gbps unmetered egress and enough processing power to handle multiple streams and multiple viewers. Although I am the sole user, this means there should be no… Read more: Bluesky Coming
  • speedtest-cli #archlinux
  • Server News – migration update
    It just goes to show you don’t always get what you pay for… Ionos appeared to have a good price for the processing power on their VPS but there were hidden charges for additional features (that would be necessary), the network was more limited, and the OS a representative assured me of was not available.… Read more: Server News – migration update
  • Server News
    So, the time has come to change hosting providers and that will entail moving an entire operating system to a different data center in another city. This is much like moving a house, not a trivial task. I have had the same IP and server location in Fremont, CA since 2017 when I moved from… Read more: Server News
  • acoustic test recording
  • ToDo notes
    Photoprism failed on upgrade. Librephotos is molasses slow on docker – fail. Going to try Picapport next – Every self-hosted photo management solution has failed for one reason or another – too many images, unsupported file types, no videos, no public web option, too basic, etc… Mail currently needs fixing, too. And, Current Status needs… Read more: ToDo notes
  • Status 07/08/24
    skysurfer.media So much to do. But things are better since I gave up deadlines for goals. They’re easier to keep. So much for launching this site in June… but things are happening, all the same. Still using WordPress but it’s really bloated and it has it’s own set of security issues despite being difficult to… Read more: Status 07/08/24
  • Phase 2
    Finally, 25,981 images uploaded to the cloud – indexing should be completed tomorrow or the next day. Then, one mass search for images to remove and I’ll start putting the best back out to the public… thinking about using pigallery and maybe even removing wordpress – all public images are going into a random pool… Read more: Phase 2
  • Slow progress
    18,000 photos transferred 8,000 still to go ~ 7 or 8 hours left …and the server is cranking away at postprocessing. So far, it appears there are some duplicates and video files will need manual intervention. Also, auto tagging is worthless – I might make a post about this, the failing of “AI” – apparently,… Read more: Slow progress
  • Progress
    So far behind… I haven’t taken very many pictures since my friend passed away, and it’s been an emotional but healing trip through time organizing a master copy for the new system. Everything is getting uploaded to the cloud – 26,000 images after removing duplicates, but including a lot of pictures that didn’t turn out.… Read more: Progress
  • Progress 2/21/24
    Incoming Photography 3k photos sorted, 4k to go. 165 video files This will complete the organization of my library from different places and different machines into one Master folder. Next will be editing the Public folder and postprocessing. I still haven’t decided on a solution for media hosting but the process is being streamlined for… Read more: Progress 2/21/24
  • Network Map
    Before (2014) – After (2024) –