I've been thinking about obtaining a more professional domain name for some time now, but didn't actually pull the trigger on it until last week. I ended up purchasing two domains, which may seem silly, but there is some logic behind it.
The two domains I purchased are...
My reasoning behind it is two-fold — davelevine.io will serve as my professional domain, while distributedcomputing.io will serve as my homelab domain. Additionally, distributedcomputing.io really spoke to me and described what I enjoy doing, which became my motivation for purchasing the domain.
Because my homelab is one project and my professional career, in a sense, is another, I wanted to keep them separate. This leads me into the point of this post — site migration.
While purchasing a domain is one thing, migrating 30 systems is no small task.
I have everything I work on, professional and homelab, proxied through Cloudflare. Locally, I use a combination of Squid Reverse Proxy and Nginx.
My personal preference is Nginx, although when I first started building my network with purpose, I began using Squid simply because it was easier to use than Nginx. Although most of my subdomains proxy through Squid, I began to quickly realize that this is something I hadn't properly documented.
Updating the mappings within Squid didn't take very long, but was awfully time-consuming. I also needed to generate a new origin certificate to include the new domain name.
Since I still own my previous domain — dowhatimeant.xyz, I decided to just add the subdomain to the existing certificate request through Let's Encrypt. Generating the cert was quick and after revoking the old certificate, I was on my way.
I began migrating services that I knew would give me the fewest headaches — mostly Docker containers and smaller pieces of software running within VMs. The biggest challenge I realized as I began moving them one-by-one was how many disparate 3rd party tools would be affected by it.
The first thing I realized was the need to update my email for different services — Reddit, Atlassian (backup KB), etc. This was easy, but still time-consuming.
Next, I needed to update ddclient to continue to make sure that DDNS still kept up to date. As of this posting, I still haven't completely configured it, but that will be tomorrow's project.
Last but not least was updating the CNAME for the custom domain I have through Uptime Robot...which led me to realize I needed to update all my subdomains within Uptime Robot.
At the time of this writing, I still have two subdomains to square away — Nagios XI and pfSense.
I tried updating the domain for Nagios earlier, but after doing so, the domain wouldn't resolve, so I had to revert. It's probably something fairly easy, but I'll get it resolved tomorrow.
The next is pfSense. Because I use pfSense as my firewall/router, it's important that I get this one right or else it will take my entire network down. I made the switch and all seems to be well so far, but I'll need to give it a few days to really make sure.
A few things I learned through this:
All in all, the migration was a success. I'm happy with the new domain, and hopefully I'll stick with it for awhile.