https://witch.house is an experimental space in progress, self-hosted and maintained by helen shewolfe tseng.
as of this update, the public index displays an ambient metaphysical zone via a simple html page with css animations and an animated gif background. clicking anywhere on the page reveals a photo of its hardware and a bit of information about its setup and origins. in the future it may become home to something else.
my server was initiated during the spring 2023 instance of solidarity infrastructures, facilitated by alice, max, and mark. i installed yunohost on a raspberry pi 4, using a domain name i'd already owned but hadn't done anything with. i learned a lot about dns zone configuration, which i then promptly forgot. i set up a custom web server app on the root folder to host a website, and experimented with other yunohost apps we'd covered in the class, like etherpad. (technical note: setting up a webapp on the root folder also means that no other apps can be installed on the root directory; any additional apps need to be installed on subdomains.)
between the summers of 2023 and 2024, my server got unplugged, my ip address changed (possibly a few times), almost all of my server's open source software fell out of date (and in some cases, became unsupported by current updates), and i found myself in a state of total amnesia about how i had previously gotten so far in the process to begin with. my initial attempt to plug things back in revealed streams of errors and issues inscrutable to me. later, i encountered mishaps with timed-out software upgrades, accidentally overheating my pi using the wrong power supply, a corrupted sd card, and other obstacles. whew! maintenance can be sisyphean!
after lots of tech support from my much more knowledgeable partner, we managed to push through and get things back online with a fresh install. as of july 2024, witch.house is up and running again! what will it become the home of? only time will tell! for now, getting a self-hosted server up and running, and periodically tending to it to keep it connected to the web (e.g. keeping the ssl certificate updated, maintaining my dns configuration as ip addresses migrate, etc.) has been and will be a project in and of itself.
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meet my server
here is my raspberry pi 4, dangling in its web of cables, reminding me of a spider:
here is where the internet enters my apartment through a hole in the wall:
here's the view from the backyard behind my building. the little white antenna, which resembles a little satellite dish attached to the top of my apartment's building, is a wireless link that connects to my internet service provider, a local company called monkeybrains. a cable from that antenna that runs down the side of the building into the hole in the wall from the previous photo. all of our housemates share this one connection, distributed in our units via wifi routers.
in the image below, you can see two wireless antennas, our neighbors’ on the left and ours on the right:
here is a sweet moment from class, with a cute visitor and personal form of emotional and spiritual infrastructure. i love you roo! =^..^=
