I've grappled with the thought recently that my peers may look down on me due to some proprietary software running in Lain.la's stack. The purists among you may completely discredit my infrastructure because of non-free software. Usually I pay these people no mind, because their fanaticism isolates precisely those that they wish to convert, but I needed to justify to myself and others exactly why I didn't use entirely FOSS for this project and why I disappointed ol' RMS.

Hello again! It has been a while since I wrote a new article, only because most things have been stable. We've been through another maintenance cycle (which is really just patching and certificate rotation these days) and I've documented my procedures and setup processes more so than ever. Here's some highlights of the updates:

This article is partially to remind myself what the heck I have made myself responsible for but also list out all the nice things I do. Please see the homepage for links to these services where applicable.

Class A Services:

(Note: Class A Services are ones I take extra good care of. These are expected to stay afloat with minimal or no downtime, and high standards of performance.)

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A malicious actor, a nuisance masquerading as a public service, and a braindead web hosting company walk into a strange bar.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

I've gotten this question a couple times, about how much it costs to run all this. The cost may seem high, but remember, it won't go higher than this since just about every item on my infrastructure wish list is complete, including most of the absurd redundancy stuff. I don't need more nodes, more servers, anything really. So this should be the cap for a long time. EDIT: It always gets more expensive because I'm a maniac. I do keep this list up to date if anything changes.

This article will be an absolute monster, so here are jump links to each section in case you want specific sections:

The network chart in my previous post is a good thing to read before starting this article.

There were a few issues I had identified with the v1 architecture that were not a problem for the first year of running lain.la, but began to worry me. I liked what I had built, but I needed to mitigate some more risks to uptime and network integrity, as well as upgrade my core network. I devised the V2 architecture as a solution for those problems. Here's what those problems were:

Ah, she has served us very well. Let's talk about my first vision for lain.la and really get into the details on what the first version's goals were. I started lain.la because I needed an outlet from a personal event. Technology has always been that outlet. So I decided to build something. Anything. I started small in August 2020 - a website, then a Gitlab for projects, and a Pomf clone. More services expanded from there, such as VMs for friends and a Seedbox.

(You can see lain.la v1 in the bottom right corner here)