Every now and then comes a time when services need to be migrated from old hosts to new hosts.

A few months ago, I migrated my personal GitLab instance from one server to another. GitLab has excellent documentation on how to perform backup and restore operations on self-hosted GitLab instances. Unfortunately, I was not so excellent at reading said instructions and ended up making a small but big mistake when restoring the GitLab backup taken from my old server onto the new server. I forgot to copy the gitlab-secrets.json file before restarting GitLab after restoring the backup.

Preface

Last week, I was working on redesigning my home network and this required some configuration changes to my ethernet switch, a Netgear GS110TP. I didn’t have the administration password handy as it was last configured many years ago. The unit has a straightforward password reset functionality which worked perfectly. While I was in there changing settings, I noticed that the firmware installed on it was quite ancient (dated 2010 or so) and that Netgear is still releasing firmware updates for this switch to this day. So naturally, I decided to update it.

As of recent years, I have been playing around with Docker quite a bit and use it in production to run quite a few services. So far, in every docker deployment I have done, I have only used IPv4. However, now that IPv6 is gaining a lot of traction I thought it would be a good idea to make all of my docker services accessible via IPv6! For about 8 months now I have been running a [matrix] chat server using docker. The server has so far attracted about 100 users around the globe and I thought it would be a good idea to make this service more accessible to users stuck behind an IPv4 Carrier-Grade NAT (CG-NAT) or to users using a translation mechanism such as NAT64 to access the IPv4 internet over IPv6 networks.

A quick introduction

I first launched my website on www.tdude.co in 2014 when I wanted a simple one-page website where I could list some of my work and my contact information for people who’d heard about me online and didn’t really know anything about me.