Kian Kasad.

Over the past few years, I have experimented with self-hosting several services, using a variety of hardware. But when the laptop I was using as a server died, I realized I needed a more reproducible and maintainable setup.

This summer (2024), I dove into learning Ansible so I could create a fully-reproducible server deployment. Ansible is an infrastructure-as-code tool, which allows me to define the desired state of my server in a set of YAML files with some custom modules written in Python. Over the span of a few months, I wrote a playbook that installs and configures all the services I need for my home server.

This allows me to not only set up the server quickly, but I also track the entire server configuration in a single Git repository, including details such as packages installed, firewall rules, and much more. This makes it easy to recover from inevitable mistakes or hardware failures.

The playbook is hosted in a GitHub repository with an automated CI pipeline that runs the playbook in a virtual machine every time I push a commit. This ensures that the playbook will always work properly on a fresh installed of Debian or Ubuntu Linux.

The server runs several services in Docker containers, all served behind a Traefik reverse proxy, complete with TLS certificates and domain names. The services include monitoring and observability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki, so I can keep an eye on the server’s health and performance. I even get alerts sent to my email when unusual events occur!

One of the amazing features of Rust is its powerful iterator system. It allows you to chain transformations on collections of data in a way that is both efficient and easy to write. I wanted to bring this power to C, so I wrote CIter.

CIter implements the most important parts of Rust’s iterator system, including nearly all transformations. It supports double-ended iterators, fixed-size iterators, and even iterators with known but non-exact size bounds.

This library is one of many smaller open-source projects I’ve worked on. The main goal was practice for myself, but I also made Citer available to others who might find it useful. To ensure its quality, I set up a continuous integration pipeline which tests the code on each commit.

What do you do when you’re bored in math class, you like programming in C, and Wordle just went viral? Duh! You write a Wordle clone for your calculator so you can play it in class. Okay maybe you wouldn’t do that, but I did.

This project opened up a new side of C programming for me: embedded systems. On the TI-84, you don’t have the standard C library functions, so you can’t just printf() text to the screen or even dynamically allocate memory. But even more importantly, the calculator only has a few kilobytes of both RAM and storage, so I had to be very careful with how I stored data in my program.

Because of the storage limitations, I had to get creative. Instead of using all 12,986 allowed Wordle words, I opted to use just the subset of 2,309 words which can appear as answers. This strays a bit from the original Wordle game, but it was a necessary trade-off to fit the game on the calculator.

kasad.com is a Debian server I’ve been running since 2020. It’s a very low-spec VPS, but it still hosts my website (the one you’re reading now), plus a variety of services for my personal use.

The most difficult one to set up by far was the mail server. It requires configuring SMTP, IMAP, DMARC, SPF, DKIM, DNS, spam filtering, authentication, mail aliasing/forwarding, and more in order to meet the stringent anti-spam requirements of other mail servers like Google’s Gmail. I spent several months learning about the nitty-gritty details of email protocols, and despite the challenges, I now have my very own self-hosted email server. You can reach me at kian@kasad.com!

I first booted up the kasad.com server in 2020, and I’ve been slowly building it up ever since. Most recently, I set up metrics collection & exporting, allowing me to use the Grafana & Prometheus instances on my other server to monitor the kasad.com server.

As this is a long-running project, I’ve written documentation on how the server is set up—mainly for my own reference, but it has helped a few other people as well. While the documentation site is not live right now, you can view an archived version using the link above.