Happy New Year!

As a follow up on my Nextcloud setup experiences, which
garnered a couple of email replies (!) from people
interested in setting up their own home servers, I have some
new information to share.

I set up my home server in a virtual machine. But it might
have been a lot simpler. It occurred to me afterward that
there might be preconfigured virtual machines for such
purposes (like a Nextcloud virtual machine), and of course,
there are.

I've found some free-as-in-beer, *mostly*-open-source
options provided by a for-profit company, but after writing
up a section on them, it felt too much like advertising, and
I love gopher for it's lack of advertising. So I deleted
that paragraph. Search for the software package you want
(like Owncloud or Horde) to install plus "virtual machine"
or "virtualbox" and you should find what you're looking for.
If you can't find them, email me.

Also, have a look at Nextcloudpi. They offer a virtual
machine version[1] and other preconfigured options for
installation on a raspberry pi (of course) or a regular
Debian system.[2]

I also found out something new on the circumlunar.space BBS
this morning, which I had been wondering about. Apparently,
the OpenVZ virtual machines in which
zaibatsu.circumlunar.space and xmpp.circumlunar.space reside
cannot be upgraded to the next version of Debian in place,
because you cannot upgrade the kernel independently (the
kernel is shared between all of the VM's on the server). For
me, migrating the XMPP server shouldn't be a huge issue,
since the Prosody installation was simple and painless, and
I should be able to migrate the config files to a new
installation, but we'll see when the time comes (Debian 8
LTS updates end in June 2020).

I'd switch to a server at home, but when you consider the
electricity and bandwidth provided by the hosting company,
CAD $13/year is insanely inexpensive, so it's worth the
hassle.

I've been reading everyone's comments on books (in their
phlogs) and gardening (BBS) and both intrigue me. I feel
like gopherspace is full of people who simultaneously enjoy
complexity and simplicity. You're a paradoxical lot! :D

Anyways, that's got me thinking about this book I read when
I was a kid. It was a rainy afternoon and I went to the
local library and sat upstairs in the mezzanine of the
children's section, found this book, and read the whole
thing. I was there for hours. I don't remember the author or
title of the book, but it was about this poor (as in
impoverished) kid who gets contacted telepathically by a
plant-like alien. I can't remember the details of the plot
after that with any clarity (I have a plot in mind, but it
may be one I made up over the intervening years), but I'd
love to re-read that book again. I've been searching a bit
online, but it's hard to find things when you can't remember
the most salient details!


[1] https://ownyourbits.com/2018/10/25/introducing-the-nextcloudpi-vm/
[2] https://ownyourbits.com/2017/02/13/nextcloud-ready-raspberry-pi-image/

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