arteteco @arteteco@qoto.org

New feature here at QOTO! We now offer free and automatic SSL certs for any websites you host at QOTO.

Aside from being free, opensource, and no data collection to host your site with us, we now offer free SSL certs too. Just use our gitlab instance to publish your website on our servers by simply marking a tick box when you set it up you can request an SSL certificate that will be automatically obtained and renewed via lets encrypt. You also have the option of using your own SSL certificate or no certificate at all when hosting from our site.

If you dont want to bring your own domain name we also provide you a free subdomain on *.qoto.io that will also be https under our own SSL certificate.

To get started just open an account on our gitLab instance:

https://git.qoto.org

For more info on this feature check out:

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/custom_domains_ssl_tls_certification/lets_encrypt_integration.html

For information on using gitlab to host pages in general then check out this lengthier resource:

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/

As always if you have any questions reach out to one of our moderators such as @freemo

#hosting #qoto #gitlab #git

After a week of working on re architecting the QOTO servers I'm mostly there. I had to write a whole new load-balancer from the ground up. The old one didnt work with docker-swarm.

The load balancer is now automated like before AND distributed. So basically I never need to worry about obtaining or configuring ssl certs or even fussing with nginx configuration. When i bring a new service up into the swarm I simply add some labels to the service and the load balancer I wrote will automatically detect it and rewrite its own nginx configuration, obtain new certs (or renew existing ones) and automatically route itself to the new service.

This was the bulk of the work, I put the source code up for it (its three containers) here for anyone who might want to steal it, I'll be documenting it and cleaning it up tomorrow:

https://git.qoto.org/modjular/swarm-proxy

I also automated the process of bringing up new nodes in the swarm so I wrote a whole bunch of scripts for that in a separate repo (I'll share that tomorrow). So at this point its just a matter of actually bringing the services up in the new framework. So far I've tested it with two services and works great.

So starting tomorrow I can start migrating QOTO services to the new framework hopefully. Its amazing how easy this is going to make my life.

Just a little update on what is going on at #QOTO.

Our Administrator @freemo has been working hard for about a week to completely recode our server architecture and eventually move over existing services to the new format.

As some of you know we use enterprise level infrastructure. currently that means we use Docker containers in a cluster formation with redundant endpoints.

However, the current way this is done is as individually managed docker containers using some nifty container layer automation to automatically renew and obtain certificates as well as scale. However by doing it as individual containers makes administering the system more difficult and can lead to bugs in the infrastructure (though thankfully we haven't run into those). As such we are moving over to using docker-swarm to maintain the cluster which will automatically handle replication and restarting containers should they fail.

This will mean quicker turnaround when updating services, little to no down time due to redundancy, and faster response time due to multiple load balancers across different regions.

While there may be some short downtime once we finally move the services over long term this should be better for everyone. We will keep everyone updated as this progresses.

In the meantime @freemo will be open-sourcing the scripts he wrote to bring everything online and manage the system. If any developers are interested in getting a copy for their own purposes please feel free to reach out to him.

#opensource #OSS #FOSS #FLOSS #AWS #Amazon #Mastoadmin #QOTO