Miskatonic University PressSTAPLR is down for a while.
The server I was running it on had been set up so that passwords expire after a year. I never logged in with a password: I used SSH and so I would connect to the server and open up a shell by magic without having to type anything (by which I mean a short series of conversations happen between my laptop and the server and they exchange incredibly complex cryptographic information).
Earlier this month, when I tried to connect, it told me my password had expired and demanded I change it. To start, it asked for my current password.
But the password I had in my password manager didn’t work! I have no idea why. Maybe this happened to me last year and I changed it in annoyance and forgot to note the new one. I had no way to log in, and neither did anyone else. The people running the virtual server can’t break in.
There was nothing to do but spin up a new one and start to configure it. I have backups and documentation, so nothing is lost, as far as I know, but it’ll take a little while to install and configure all the parts that make STAPLR work. I was running quite an old version of Sonic Pi, and I may need to do more work to get STAPLR working with the newest version, but that’s necessary anyway.
Ah well. I’ve made sure all my passwords for the new server are accurate in my password manager, and I used chage to change when my password expires. It was set to 365 days, but I made it 3650.
I used Certbot to get HTTPS going on the STAPLR web site. It took about a minute. That is one amazing piece of software. So powerful and so easy! (That is, if you’re comfortable on the command line, but even if you’re not an expert, you can just copy and paste the commands they give and it’ll work.)