Note to future self (and you, Dear Reader): WordPress on Docker, behind an nginx front end, spread across two servers in a home environment (see photo) is not a good combination to maintain data reliability.
To summarize: I’ve always kept old computer parts around and, almost a decade ago when I bought my house, I build out a single home server to run Minecraft/games, Plex, and a website. I outgrew that single server so, just a few years ago, I built a NAS server to centralize my data storage and offload those functions. The NAS software I picked came bundled with Docker (and I was sure I didn’t want to work at Liquid Web forever) so I started migrating my web stuff (including my old LiveJournal data) to services running on that Docker instance.
Docker is awesome, but it gets quirky doing anything outside the standard practice. I tried to get ownCloud (and NextCloud) working in a subdirectory off my home server’s domain name and it was so difficult to get everything forwarded correctly that I eventually gave up and set it up on it’s own sub domain.
A blog should be easier (DokuWiki doesn’t care where you run it since it’s flat files), but WordPress isn’t easy to get working this way. I just wanted this to live under the /blog/ subdirectory of my home server’s website. Making it work behind my nginx front-end required a line of “host” variables in docker and some magic header forwarding to help it translate packets from the front-end server to the docker instance’s IP:port where WordPress was running. It worked… but just barely. Updates were difficult to do and it quit on me at least once before the January fiasco. I still have no idea how I made it work after that first failure.
This was a fun learning experience, but I needed a dedicated web server so most of the site can stay online if the other servers go down. The home site is now running on it’s own low power device (a repurposed MacMini running the better supported Apache Web Server). Once that was up, it was time to migrate the small stuff over to a standard environment. Unfortunately, the only backup I had was from November. #DadLife requires that I only invest minutes per week toward server administration, but after six months or so I was able to find time to basically hack the WP files in the Docker environment and get the missing data moved over to the new server. Ugh!
Anyway, now that it’s back, I can continue plugging along on fixing the old LJ content and migrating my other social media stuff into this location. Someday I’ll train an AI LLM on this blog and you’ll be able to chat with “Virtual William”. I’m sure my wife and kids will love hate me having a virtual doppelganger.
