Rationale

I was in a forest and barely reachable for the last few days cooking:

When a message came through from my wife:

The server in the closet has fans turned on all the time. Is there anything that I can do to make it less noisy?

When I returned, I checked the traffic stats:

According to anubis, it’s a googlebot:

I doubt googlebot caused this – Google still has some reputation to maintain. I think it’s much more likely that some bots started posing as Google. I had anubis with default settings, which was fine for a while, until now.

Switching to stagit

I had two options – keep fighting the game and try to protect my gitea instance, or see if I can remove gitea altogether. Since I am the only one pushing to gitea and I no longer have family SSO, I can replace it with something simpler:

1. bare git push/pull over SSH.
2. dumb downloader for HTTPS for anonymous clones.
3. stagit to pre-generate repository content, so I can link to various files.

This is what I had just before the change:

After:

Downstream effects

I maintain undocker, which relies on gitea in two ways:

1. gitea hosts its integration tests, which I have removed and moved to the repo.
2. nixpkgs relies on gitea urls to build the package, which I fixed too.

Results

So far the outgoing traffic seems to be effectively zero, and the closet is cool and silent. Side effect – I can freely share my code snippets to the plagiarism machine again: