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.