I’m going to have to adjust to island living, and that might mean not having static IP addresses. I certainly need flexibility while I’m in the process of moving, and I’d prefer that my servers keep running if I have to switch between my awesome gigabit fiber — which is subject to disruption whenever the six-mile-long fiber gets broken by a falling tree — and my much slower, behind CGNAT, satellite link. I want to continue to host the servers in my home office; at least the ones that have private data like the email server and password generator.
I’ve decided to get a cloud server on which I can run a Wireguard VPN, then my servers can roam while still appearing to have a static IP. I went to set up the VPN on a virtual private server instance which also hosts my DNS mirror, and completely hosed the instance (not wireguard’s fault). It’s dead and cannot be restored. I have backups, but you have to be able to boot to restore the backups. I should have had a snapshot, but apparently I’m not that clever. So I abandoned that instance and created a new server.
In pointing my primary DNS server to the new mirror, I cleverly managed to bring the primary down. Chaos and panic ensued for nearly an hour while all my services were down until I figured out the dumb thing I’d done (which managed to kill all my DNS everywhere without generating a single error message) and get it running again.
It’s always DNS.
—2p
addendum 2024-04-09: I figured out a way to resurrect the “completely hosed instance” so it’s back, but not currently as a DNS mirror.