Debian image building (part 2)

Today I finished up building my base image for Debian. The most relevant change in the image itself was filter qemu guest agent logs because otherwise there would be useless message every 10 seconds. See this qemu issue for reference.

Now that I got a usable image I created a VM template in Proxmox (first create VM and then convert it to template). Now to create new VMs I just clone the template and that’s it; easy enough for now. I’m still mostly just clicking around in Proxmox GUI, I should start figuring out the command line stuff and other ways to automate things.

Speaking of automation, I did now set up a git repo where I collect Ansible playbooks for my VMs. For now it contains one set of playbooks for Debian image builder and another for the blog hosting web server. The image builder playbooks make it very easy to rebuild the images whenever I need to.

So now I have also tested that the Proxmox VM template works for real-world usage as both the blog and image builders are using it.

I was also thinking about options for DNS servers. I’m heavily leaning towards NSD currently. Knot DNS seems nice too but maybe lot more complex? Not sure if I need to set up split DNS or how I will arrange the name hierarchy for my setup.

Next steps would be to set up LPMPL server. For now I’ll probably just host everything LPMPL on one VM, the same it was on AWS. I can later split it up to smaller pieces once I have more infra set up.

One problem I see already is how I’ll arrange the reverse proxying for public IP. Right now the public IP 443 port is forwarded to the server hosting the blog. Maybe I’ll convert that to generic reverse proxy / web server? Or set up separate server for blog and reverse proxies? That seems like overkill.. I also need the DNS asap, working with bare IPs is annoying.