blog on seraph

Infrastructure updates, a new machine, and the usual suffering

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything up. A lot has happened. Let me try to cover it without this turning into a novel.

Vaultwarden

I’ve been meaning to self-host a password manager for a long time. Vaultwarden is a lightweight, Bitwarden-compatible server — same clients, same browser extensions, your data stays on your own hardware. It’s running in Docker at vault.seraph.ws, behind nginx with a Let’s Encrypt cert. Signups are disabled after account creation. fail2ban watches the log for bad auth attempts. Honestly the easiest thing I’ve set up in months, which I’m choosing to read as a sign that I’m getting better at this.

Building a Self-Hosted Pastebin in Rust

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:00:00 +0000

At this point I’m just building every classic web utility from scratch in Rust. Last week it was a link shortener. This week: pastebin.

Why

Same reason as everything else on this server — I want it to be mine. Pastebin.com is fine but it’s ad-ridden, has a size limit, and I don’t control what happens to the content. Running my own means I can paste whatever I want, set my own limits, and know exactly where the data lives.

Building a Self-Hosted Mail Stack (And Everything Else)

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:58:44 +0000

This one got away from me a little bit.

What started as “I want to host my own email” turned into two days of infrastructure work that I am genuinely proud of, and which I am now going to document before I forget what I actually did.

Email, Or: How Hard Could It Be

Famously, the answer is: pretty hard. Email is one of those things that looks simple from the outside — you send a message, it arrives somewhere — and reveals itself to be an absolutely cursed protocol the moment you try to run your own server.

Building a Self-Hosted Link Shortener in Rust with Axum and PostgreSQL

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How I built and deployed a self-hosted link shortener in Rust using Axum, PostgreSQL, and SQLx — with input sanitization, URL validation, click analytics, and a token-protected admin interface.

Self-Hosting a Hugo Site with a Git Push Deploy Pipeline

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently set up this site on a self-managed VPS instance rather than using a managed platform like GitHub Pages or Vercel. This post is a writeup of everything involved — partly as documentation for my future self, partly because I couldn’t find a single resource that covered all of it end to end.

Why Self-Host?

I’ve been using Linux for most of my adult life but truth be told, I am an absolute novice when it comes to system administration. My Arch installation is an absolute mess full of deprecated packages, broken symlinks, and the SSD isn’t even living in its original machine since my desktop started failing. This project is first and foremost a way to teach myself proper system administration, development pipelines, get some familiarity with the tools I’ve just never fully bothered to learn, let alone master, and eventually be a cute little portfolio I can stick on my resume ^.^