I love Hugo, and it serves as the basis of both my blogs. It’s quite an incredible static site generator, which gives a ton of flexibility and is very lightweight to run, as on a modern machine, serving static HTML files is pretty much free. But, of course, not everything is perfect. For a while now, I’ve been looking for a way to host a bunch of loose thoughts that I’ve been having. “Create a twitter/bluesky/mastodon account”, the keen among you would say. But, here’s the thing: I don’t want a social aspect to this, just a place to dump my thoughts.

For a while now, I had this growing feeling that something was wrong with my main server. This is where I host most of my public services: a mail server, a bunch of websites behind nginx, PostgreSQL and MariaDB, my git forge, and a few other things. These are all services that I use for myself, which wouldn’t be a problem, but I’ve also started selling some of them to friends, family, and small businesses that want to have more control over their data. Their trust means that I have a responsibility. And that means stepping up my game.

I was lucky to have been born in the early 90s. I was also lucky that my parents had some disposable income. Even luckier that things like the Raspberry Pi Foundation existed while I was alive and young.

I shouldn’t take these things for granted. I lived through the rise of the personal computer, the introduction of internet to the masses, and then high speed internet, then high speed mobile internet, and the smartphone as well. I’d say that I’m way beyond basic computer literacy, but that’s because I lived through those times, and following my curiosity led me on this path. But those times are now gone, and not everyone has the same proclivities for nerd stuff as I do.

The amount of posts and videos that I’ve seen in the past ~12 months which are announcing the end of Free Open Source Software is off the charts. From AI tools being set loose on several project’s issue and pull requests boards, to a veritable flood of security vulnerabilities being discovered by automated tools, not forgetting the burn out that many developers are feeling in these agentic times, and the fall of GitHub; it would seem that FOSS is undergoing a crisis.

For a while now, I’ve self-hosted a runner to integrate with Gitea Action. But there was something about it that was leaving me worried: in an age where software supply chain security is becoming more and more important, I felt like I needed to improve the security of the setup. The answer I arrived at, while not perfect (yet), it’s a great improvement over what I had before. This post will be a walk through of what I had, what and why I chose to replace it, how I did it, and where I could still improve it.