💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20181111 captured on 2022-04-29 at 11:47:14.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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Well, it's adventure time for me! I spent a little time outside today, putting away the outdoor furniture. It snowed the other day (and then melted away) and winter is very close. Afterwards, I started learning to set up a server. I have a ThinkPad X120e laptop running Windows that I use for working with old devices that only have windows drivers and software (BlackBerry phones in particular). Otherwise, it sits in the basement collecting dust, since it's quite small (11.6") and fairly underpowered (AMD E-350 CPU). It occurred to me that given it's relative disuse and low power consumption, it might be a decent server for small jobs, especially given that circumlunar.space resides on a VPS with 128MB of RAM! So I've installed Virtualbox with a Debian netinstall. Right now, it has Apache2 and pygopherd on it and both are working on my home network. In order to get external access to the virtual server, I had to set up port forwarding through the Virtualbox settings. So far so good. I've also set up a Dynamic DNS address with DuckDNS -- and need to decide whether to buy a domain name or just use the subdomain assigned by DuckDNS. I think I'd like a domain name, just to keep things consistent over time. Free dynamic DNS providers seem to come and go. There are a few more things to set up before the server is live and accessible from the outside world. The laptop needs a static IP on my internal network and port forwarding has to be set up on the router. But that's it. I'm a little leery about opening up the ports (I don't know anything about securing a server), so if it turns out that I don't need much computing power, I may follow solderpunk's lead and sign up for a VPS, which would help to isolate any catastrophic events somewhere in a server room far away. Of course, that will depend on the function of the server, and I still haven't decided what that will be....