A few hours later, reality slapped me in the face: I managed to completely nuke my poor firewall appliance while trying to upgrade it as well. RIP.
Technically, it still booted and looked fine – no scary red error messages. But this box was the one running Traefik, the gatekeeper to my self-hosted blog. And suddenly… things got weird.
Every click took forever, as if someone was physically standing on the network cable. Pages would load… eventually… but it felt like the internet was powered by hamsters on strike. 🐹
I tried to dig into it, but the problem seemed buried somewhere deep in the system. Maybe it was just one tiny config hiccup that Sherlock Holmes could’ve solved, but me? I was just annoyed and tired of watching my blog crawl.
So I pulled out Plan B: threw the blog back onto cheap external hosting for a couple bucks a month. Not glamorous, but hey, it worked.
Lesson Learned (The Hard Way)
Sometimes you really do need to invest more time into prep work instead of thinking, “Ah, it’ll be fine, what could possibly go wrong?” (Spoiler: everything.)
I was messing with too many knobs at once, assuming it would all just work out. And when it didn’t, there was no real way back. At least not without sacrificing a weekend and my sanity.
On the plus side, I don’t actually mind that my external “housing” is now truly external again, while my homelab stays the playground for experiments and chaos engineering. 😉
Biggest takeaway: documentation and preparation are not optional luxuries. They’re the difference between smooth sailing and a blog that feels like it’s running over dial-up.
The Fun Part
But not everything was doom and gloom. I had a pretty sweet aha moment: I grabbed my existing Ansible code (originally written for spinning up Nextcloud instances, and yes, I promised weeks ago I’d publish it here…) and repurposed it in minutes to set up a fresh WordPress blog.
After restoring a backup with the world’s best plugin (All-in-One WP Migration and Backup), my blog was back online faster than you can say “never test in production.”
So yeah – automation, when you actually use it right, is ridiculously awesome. 🚀