Caddy is very easy to get started with, but it has its own set of trade-offs. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed multiple hard-to-isolate performance quirks, some of which were likely related to the official Docker image. In particular, I had built a Docker image of Caddy with webdav support, and the overall performance tanked to seconds per request, even with webdav disabled. I still have no clue what happened there; instrumenting Caddy through Docker appeared nontrivial, so I gave up on webdav support, reverted to my old Docker based setup, and everything was fast, once again.

There is a good amount of inflexibility in Caddy, such as the git plugin’s limitation to deploy to a non-root folder of the web root. And its rewrite logic is usually what you want, but not nearly as flexible as nginx’s.

Asking questions on their IRC is usually met with no response of any kind, which indicates to me that the project’s community isn’t very active.

The move to Caddy v2 is unwelcoming; I don’t want to relearn yet another set of config files and quirks, especially weeding through the layer of configuration file format adapters and the abstracted-away configuration options, so I rather just use Certbot and some other HTTPD that won’t change everything for the fun of it.²

Until recently Caddy experimented with a pretty dubious monetizing strategy. HackerNoon published an article detailing how it worked. In short: they plastered text all over their website claiming you “need to buy a license” to use Caddy commercially, though that claim was never true. Caddy was always covered by Apache License 2.0. Instead, you needed a commercial license in the narrow use-case that your organization wants to use Caddy’s prebuilt release binaries as offered on their website. It is good they stopped this scheme, but it leaves a bad taste with the community, and with me, and discourages me from relying on the project moving forward.

I have used both GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages in the past. My experience with GitHub Pages is it’s relatively inflexible and difficult to see what is going to be published, and has a CI/CD setup only useful for certain Jekyll based sites. GitLab pages, on the other hand, lets you set up any old Docker-based CI/CD workflow, so it is possible to render a blog with GitLab CI of any static site generating software. The IEEE-CS student chapter I am a part of does just this. We use a combination of static redirect sites and a Pelican-powered static website. There are a large number of example repositories for most of the popular ways to publish a static website, including Gatsby, Hugo, and Sphinx. Needless to say GitLab Pages puts GitHub pages to shame in terms of flexibility.

There are two steps in setting up GitLab Pages. These are the most important ideas related to GitLab pages; how to navigate the site is something the reader must experience for oneself. Nothing beats experimentation and reading the docs. Make sure to refer to the official GitLab Pages documentation for further details.

There are a few gotchas about GitLab Pages. Some of them are related to GitLab Pages users not being familiar with all of the DNS RFCs. Others are simply because GitLab Pages has quirks too.

GitLab pages isn’t perfect, but this should streamline what services my VPS hosts, and give me more freedom to fiddle with my VPS configuration and deployment. I look forward to rebuilding my VPS with cdist, ansible, or saltstack. While that happens, my website will be up thanks to GitLab pages. Also, I imagine GitLab Pages is a bit more resilient to downtime than a budget VPS provider.

The repositories with .gitlab-ci.yml files for both this site, and winny.tech are public on GitLab official hosting. Presently it is the simplest setup possible, simply deploying pre-generated content already checked into git, but the possibilities are endless.

IT is a good idea to verify if your kernel is missing a driver at boot, or is missing firmware or both. Boot up a Live USB with good hardware compatibility, such as GRML¹ or Ubuntu’s, and let’s see what framebuffer driver our host is trying to use²:

$ dmesg | grep -i 'frame.*buffer'
[    4.790570] efifb: framebuffer at 0xe0000000, using 8128k, total 8128k
[    4.790611] fb0: EFI VGA frame buffer device
[    4.820637] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 240x67
[    6.643895] i915 0000:00:02.0: fb1: i915drmfb frame buffer device

Se we can see the efifb is initially used for a couple seconds, then i915 is used for the rest of the computer’s uptime. Now let’s look at if firmware is necessary, first checking if modinfo(8) knows of any firmware:

$ modinfo i915 -F firmware
i915/bxt_dmc_ver1_07.bin
i915/skl_dmc_ver1_27.bin
i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_04.bin
... SNIP ...
i915/kbl_guc_33.0.0.bin
i915/icl_huc_ver8_4_3238.bin
i915/icl_guc_33.0.0.bin

This indicates this driver will load firmware when available, and if necessary for the particular mode of operation or hardware.

Now let’s look at dmesg to see if any firmware is loaded:

[    0.222906] Spectre V2 : Enabling Restricted Speculation for firmware calls
[    5.511731] [drm] Finished loading DMC firmware i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_04.bin (v1.4)
[   25.579703] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: loaded firmware version 36.77d01142.0 op_mode iwlmvm
[   25.612759] Bluetooth: hci0: Minimum firmware build 1 week 10 2014
[   25.620251] Bluetooth: hci0: Found device firmware: intel/ibt-12-16.sfi
[   25.712793] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: Allocated 0x00400000 bytes for firmware monitor.
[   27.042080] Bluetooth: hci0: Waiting for firmware download to complete

Aha! So it appears we need i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_04.bin for i915. In the case case one doesn’t need firmware, it won’t show anything related to drm or a line with your driver name in it.

By the way, it is a good idea to check dmesg for hints about missing firmware, or alternative drivers, for example my trackpad is supported by both i2c and synaptics based trackpad drivers, and the kernel was kind enough to tell me.

On Gentoo install sys-kernel/linux-firmware. You will have to agree to some non-free licenses; nothing too inane, but worth mentioning. Now just run emerge -av sys-kernel/linux-firmware. (On other distros it might be this easy, or more difficult; for example—in my experience Debian does not ship every single firmware like Gentoo does, so YMMV.)

Since most of my systems run Gentoo, it is business as usual to deploy a kernel with most excess drivers disabled except for common hot-swappable components such as USB network interfaces, audio devices, and so on. For example, this laptop’s config was originally derived from genkernel’ stock amd64 config with most extra drivers disabled, then augmented with support for an Acer ES1-111M-C7DE, and finally with support for this Elitebook.

I had compiled the kernel with i915 support built into the image, as opposed to an additional kernel module. Unfortunately this meant the kernel is unable to load firmware from filesystem, because it appears only kernel modules can load firmware from filesystem. To work around this without resorting to making i915 a kernel module, we can include the drivers within the kernel image (vmlinuz). Including firmware and drivers both in the vmlinuz has a couple benefits. First it will always be available. There is no need to figure out how to load the driver and firmware from initrd, let alone getting the initrd generator one is using, to cooperate. A downside is it makes the kernel very specific to the machine, because perhaps a different Intel machine needs a different firmware file compiled in.

To achieve including the firmware in kernel, I set the following values in my kernel config (.config in your kernel source tree).

CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE="i915/kbl_dmc_ver1_04.bin"
CONFIG_EXTRA_FIRMWARE_DIR="/lib/firmware"

Note, if you’re using menuconfig, you can type /EXTRA_FIRMWARE (slash for search, then the text) followed by keyboard return to find where these settings exist in the menu system.

Then I verified i915 is indeed not a kernel module, but built into the kernel image (it would be m if it’s a module):

CONFIG_DRM_I915=y

After compiling & installing the kernel (and generating a dracut initrd for cryptsetup/lvm), I was able to reboot and get an early pre-mounted-root framebuffer on this device.

I discovered the Gentoo devs have begun shipping an ebuild that builds and installs a kernel with a portable, livecd friendly config. In addition this package will optionally generates an initrd with dracut as a pkg_postinst step, making it very suitable as a replacement for users who just want a working kernel, and don’t mind a excessive compatibility (at a cost to size and build time).

This presents a different challenge, because while this package does allow the user to drop in their own .config, it is not very multiple-machine-deployment friendly to hard-code each individual firmware into the kernel. Instead we tell dracut to include our framebuffer driver. As mentioned above I found this computer uses the i915 kernel driver for framebuffer. Let’s tell dracut to include the driver:

cat > /etc/dracut.conf.d/i915.conf <<EOF
add_drivers+=" i915 "
EOF

Dracut is smart enough to pick up the firmware the kernel module needs, provided they are installed. To get an idea what firmware dracut will include, run modinfo i915 -F firmware which will print out a bunch of firmware relative paths.

After applying this fix, just regenerate your initrd using dracut; in my case I let portage do the work: emerge -1av sys-kernel/vanilla-kernel. Finally reboot.

Check dmesg. Always check dmesg. We found two ways to deploy firmware, in-kernel and in-initrd. The in-kernel technique is best for a device-specific kernel, the in-initrd is best for a portable kernel. I am a big fan of the second technique because it scales well to many machines.

I did not touch on the political side of using binary blobs. It would be nice to not use any non-free software, but I rather have a working system with a couple small non-free components, than a non-working system. Which is more valuable, your freedom, or reduced capacity of your tools?

I should mention unison is a superb tool for synchronizing your data. It shows the user a list of changes to each directory being synchronized, waits for the user to decide which way each file should be synchronized:

1. Send file from host A to B
2. Send file from host B to A
3. Ignore the file this time
4. Ignore the file permanently
5. Merge the files

Because unison doesn’t try to be fancy or automatic, it is easy to understand what is happening.

Here are the steps I used to get started with Blink, as it was relatively unclear where to find documentation and which settings are necessary to configure. Usage information can be found via the help command, the README on GitHub⁷, and fiddling with the UI.

1. Run the config command.
   1. Default User -> set to your preferred username on most of your servers
   2. Add a new font via: Appearance -> Add a new font. Open the gallery and grab the raw CSS file (you can get a raw URL after switching to GitHub desktop), then paste it into the URL Address Field. I prefer Droid Sans Mono for its readability at all sizes.

   3. Keys -> + -> Create New

      Please use ssh keypair authentication. Password authentication requires you to memorize a password to log in which can be bruteforced or otherwise leaked when typing it in the wrong context. Also, be sure to use a unique key on each of your devices to make revocation easier when a device is no longer used.

      Note: it appears keys are always stored as plaintext, which is acceptable for your uses, but it appears ssh-keygen can create a key with a passphrase. I wasn't able to get Blink to work with Passphrase protected keys, but I didn't try very hard. YMMV.

      • Type: RSA
      • Bits: 4096 (why not?)
      • Name: id_rsa
   4. Hosts -> +
      • Host: the name you gave your host when running ssh host or mosh host. This is not related to the server's hostname, though it can be the same. I prefer simple names, usually the hostname before the first dot (e.g. worf.winny.tech becomes simply worf)
      • User: make sure this is correct
      • Key: select a key to use.
2. Now you need to install the SSH public key:
   1. Run config again
   2. Keys -> id_rsa -> Copy Public Key

   3. Install it some way.

      I usually prefer to visit https://ptpb.pw/f and paste the public key, hit Paste, then copy the url with the text of "created". You can then curl https://ptpb.pw/PasteId on the server via another login setup (or ssh from a set up machine) and add it to your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Make sure that file is mode 0600 (chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys). Also make sure the .ssh directory is 0700 (chmod 0700 ~/.ssh). OpenSSH refuses to use authorized_keys if these permissions are world readable.

3. Run ssh worf. Congratuations, you now have a SSH session on the best iOS client available at this time.
4. To use mosh, ensure mosh is installed on the server.⁸ Then run mosh worf.

After reviewing a list of org-mode¹ capable static website generators², I decided to see if org-static-blog³ could suffice my simple needs. My criteria for choosing an org-mode static site generator was:

• it must be actively maintained,
• it must be simple to set up with customizations,
• and it must work with Emacs 26 and later.

This ruled out quite a few right away. I didn't attempt using org-publish, as it looked like a great deal of configuration to achieve a minimum viable web-page for this project.

Following the org-static-blog README documentation, it is very straight forward to get a minimal viable website generated. I added the following to my init.el:

(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist (cons (concat org-static-blog-posts-directory ".*\\.org\\'") 'org-static-blog-mode))
(setq org-static-blog-publish-title "blog.winny.tech")
(setq org-static-blog-publish-url "https://blog.winny.tech/")
(setq org-static-blog-publish-directory "~/projects/blog/")
(setq org-static-blog-posts-directory "~/projects/blog/posts/")
(setq org-static-blog-drafts-directory "~/projects/blog/drafts/")
(setq org-static-blog-enable-tags t)

(setq org-static-blog-page-header
      "
<link href=\"static/style.css\" rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" />
")

I opted to setq all the configuration variables; I will likely switch to using M-x customize-group RET org-static-blog RET in the future however. It's a better experience.

Then I simply create a new post with M-x org-static-blog-create-new-post RET <TITLE> RET, edit the buffer, save it, then run M-x org-static-blog-publish RET. I also added some styling to my style.css⁴ based off the Tachyons CSS framework⁵. I had previously used Bootstrap⁶ for styling but was hoping to avoid adding framework and other extra tooling that shouldn't be necessary to generate a simple site like this one.

I am a fan of the Caddy⁷ web server which offers automatic HTTPS via LetsEncrypt with only a few lines of configuration. In addition Caddy has a plugin named git which offers the ability to automatically deploy content from git repositories with webhook support. To deploy the following steps are taken:

1. M-x org-static-blog-publish RET from Emacs to regenerate the static site,
2. commit the changes in git,
3. and finally push the git branch to GitHub.

After these steps, GitHub automatically sends a HTTP POST request to my Caddy server with information about the new git commits and Caddy pulls the git repository. If everything went well and the webhook successfully fired, the website is now deployed.

With this simple setup I can write posts. I can easily move the configuration to a new host at will. In addition my setup does not depend on future use of GitHub as GitLab, Gogs, and other git hosts offer webhook support in the same way. Most importantly, I can author org-mode files and have a better balance between features and ease of use than what markdown offers.

Web dev is one of my least favorite programming exercises. Between all the testing necessary to ensure a simple site works across many platforms, the trend to use a very complex system such as webpack and many other tools to produce simple websites, and the perpetual flux-and-flow between vendors only partially implementing good features, web dev just doesn't do it for me. Hence, I am very pleased how simple this project turned out to be.