This week was fairly uneventful with work. Most of it was spent researching computer on modules, however I still think that using a FPGA SOC would be the best option as there is already a FPGA in the product. The best option I found in a COM used a 204 pin SODIMM connector, which is significantly larger than the existing COM, being slightly smaller than a stick of gum, when the SOC would be the size of the existing FPGA. The biggest problem with most COMs is the lack of GPIO available, as we need it to interface with a FPGA. It’ll be interesting to talk about the amount of work in moving from one alternative to another.

On the other hand, I’ve moved around some things with regards to servers. I’ve removed the GCP VPS, as it was slowly racking fees and my free credits are about to expire. Now most things go to the Oracle VPS, which seems to be OK at the moment.

I’ve also set up a mail server on the Oracle box, which I’m working on making complete to use for all site related mail. It was a bit of a pain to set up, but I think most of the problems were due to uneven DNS propagation. Now I have to set up proper virtual mailboxes, and web-mail. But that should be easy after the main bit is done.

I finally got around to setting up a VPN on the oracle box to view US content. After fooling around with WireGuard and failing to get it to work, I ended up going with OpenVPN. For some reason after setting it up I could connect but had no external connections, which I fixed by changing a few settings. After that I was unable to resolve DNS, but that fixed itself with some time. I’m pretty happy with it at the moment, especially with its speed compared to the uni VPN. I’ll probably give WireGuard another shot after it gets integrated into the kernel, but I guess there’s less incentive now other than for the learning experience.

I’m now hosting repo on my home server, which was interesting to setup as Optus blocks port 80 but leaves port 443 unblocked. I ended up getting a SSL certificate with acme.sh, thankfully that can get certs though DNS. Although I can’t setup 301s from HTTP, at least there’s something.

I also set up steaming with Jellyfin from my home machine. I’m hosting it in a docker container, and using Nginx as a reverse proxy and for SSL. So far its pretty good, although the upload speed at home isn’t the best, but it’ll have to do. Plus, my GPU isn’t supported for transcoding, so I’m left with software transcoding. It still works and means I don’t have to remember more ports at home.

It’s been a week for improvements with all my server stuff. It’ll be interesting to now try and make web-mail work. Let’s hope its not too difficult.

Additionally, lets hope work gets more interesting. I think I’m running out of COMs to look at. At least its work that will look good on a resume.