Week One Update: Networking Shenanigans

January 10, 2021

Today is the end of the first week of the year (assuming you count weeks according to the ISO). I've done quite a bit in the world of baz.bar, from setting up FreeBSD on an old eMachine and a couple of Orange Pis, to moving from Scrapazon Web Services to RackNerd, and setting up Kerberos, LDAP, Nextcloud, Postfix, and Dovecot.

I also upgraded OpenWRT, which basically meant setting most services up from scratch again, because the built-in backup is not nearly as robust as one would think. In fact, I had to install packages again, because the upgrade apparently erases them. Note to self: I should probably backup as much of the router data as I can to Nextcloud.

Unfortunately, this week also involved discovering that Nextcloud Social has a bit of bitrot. After spending enough time getting the .well-known URIs to function (hint: the documentation is wrong), I can't follow anyone. It is, on the whole, quite a useless app.

On the plus side, now that I've brought Nextcloud in-house—literally, it's running on a machine in the house—and hosting my own email, I am that much closer to finally ditching the likes of Google and their kind-of-not-really free services, at least the few that I use personally. I still work with a few organizations that use a free version of Google Workspace; but, the less often I use their services, the better.

Later this year, I'll document some of my efforts in more detail. While there is a slew of documentation, tutorials, etc., about the software I am using, I've had to piece together quite a bit of them to get a better view. Often, I found the documentation was for one operating system while I was working on another. One the whole, the FreeBSD Handbook is an excellent resource for FreeBSD; but, I found a few places where even they were a tad lacking.

In any case, boldog új évet! Until next time.