💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20181221 captured on 2023-01-29 at 16:38:37.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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Haven't phlogged much lately, for two reasons. The boring one is that it's the busy season at work. Fortunately, that's done now. The more interesting one is that I was learning the inner workings of setting up a server and (hopefully) hardening it a bit. I tend to get obsessive about things, especially when I can't figure them out. So the past week was one of those weeks. The goal was to get my data out of the cloud, as much as possible. I investigated a number of possibilities, including eGroupWare, Horde, and Nextcloud. I managed to get eGroupWare running, but it wasn't quite what I wanted. Horde was impossible. No matter what I did, it wouldn't work. That was also my experience when I tried to set it up several years back. So I'm not surprised. The last option was Nextcloud. Nextcloud took me down the rabbit hole. I could get it set up and running, but could not get it to work with SSL. I'm sure that I mashed the config files beyond recognition, so I deleted the directories for apache2, mysql, and php from /etc/ and thought I'd start over. Here's a hint: don't ever do that. Nothing works at all afterward. The only way I was able to fix it was to reinstall and then purge everything. And then reinstall again. That wasn't really enough, either. There were still error messages galore. So I had to purge all of the programs that were throwing errors and reinstall them too. Back in the day, I first learned my way around linux using a system designed for 80486s called BasLinux. It was a slimmed down version of Slackware and from time to time when you installed programs you found yourself ldd'ing your way through dependency hell. That's what it's like after you delete directories from /etc/. I now know that it would have been better to just 'apt-get purge' the fuck out of things, but you know... you live and learn. Anyways, the many cycles of install-purge-reinstall got me there. I learned about apache config files, a little about setting up a database, and some surprising things about .htaccess files (Note to the Nextcloud people: who the hell would ever want their cloud data directories to be browsable by default? Just saying). There was also an opportunity to figure out how to skirt my ISP's port blocking by forwarding through obscure ports.... and I finally learned how to alias my server's domain name to the local IP on the router. Small victories. So anyways.... it would seem that my calendar, contacts, and notes are coming out of big data's clutches and moving to my little home server. Prosody (xmpp, easy to setup) and inn2 (nntp, looks like hell to configure) are next on the list of server projects.