So, the server forwarding setup from last week is working. I’m able to reliably connect to my home and working on forwarding the appropriate services so that they are accessible.

Now, if that was all of it, you’d probably be wondering why I’m writing this post. So I was looking over my GCP bill, and while I’m still on the free year and have plenty of credit left, I noticed that some was gone. Wondering where it went, I started to look over the items. From that, I’m thinking that I may be going over the network egress limit of the free tier. “How much is the free egress limit?” you may ask. 1Gb egress a day. And not only that, but its restricted to data from North America to the rest of the world, excluding China and Australia. As an Australian, that starts to annoy me. While you may think that should be enough, and, if I were only hosting a website, I’d probably agree with you. I, however, am also hosting a package repository which I actively pull from.

This started to annoy me, so I started to look around at what Oracle’s offering was, since I already have an existing VPS there. Turns out they offer 10Tb a month free. Now, that sounds better to me. And to top it off, that limit is region-less. So, I think I may get around to moving the repository onto the Oracle box. The slower speed is worth the savings as I’m pretty sure I’m the only one using the repository.

While I’m doing this, I’m looking at alternatives to my current package building method. Although my scripts are generally pretty good, they silently fail, and they can fail whenever there is something in the chain that causes a hiccup, such as a failed pull or a source difference. So I’m looking at alternatives as I wouldn’t really like to have to write something from scratch. Now, the obvious option would be to go with something like aurutils, and while that has nice features like automatic updating, I have not figured out how to daily build packages yet. This is a big one for me as daily Emacs builds were the initial reason for starting this whole journey for me. The archlinuxcn repository has automatic building, shown by 3 Emacs-git updates a day. From their GitHub page, it seems like they’re using something called “lilac”, however I have no idea what that is and all their documentation is in Chinese. So it looks like a fair bit of research is in my near future. At least it looks like it may be interesting. And as a benefit, it seems like I may be able to start signing my packages, if I use the lilac method, so I may get a bit more professional about this whole thing, so that’s a nice plus.

Onto reading more fun documentation. It makes for mediocre procrastination, something I should write about in my next post.