Been Geeking Around

Last year I got a vm on vultr, installed free-bsd and pointed the consultingsmiths.com domain at it. I messed with it for a while, made a few posts, and then Life intervened and I let it go.

Life has eased up just a bit - it’s the not-surprising hot-and-humid here (it’s July after all) and at my advanced years and somewhat misbehaving cardio systems, I’m supposed to avoid the “mad dogs and Englishmen syndrome” and stay away from the noonday sun. So what do I do? I fire up that other tower machine next to my desk, the one that I built around one of the old server mobos that we installed in Illinois in 2013. I call it “kootenay” because that’s where I lived years ago when I was a back-to-the-land hippie.

Although I discovered Unix in the mid-80s by working with the USDA on a SysV r2 deployment (3B2s - thousands of them) and miss the little things about Unix that Linux doesn’t echo, I’ve been using Debian for almost forever (look at that stack of old install CDs over there!) so I installed Debian 12 as a server — no desktops, no X, no nothing other than sshd, left it headless, and began playing with it. It’s been over a decade since I’ve been an admin to a remote server and I’ve had to look up more than I’d like to admit to get it secured and fitting nicely into my local network. I installed nginx and played with it for a little while, then decided to reinstall and bring it up as a git server.

So what’s with the server at vultr, the one that this blog was living on? Right now it’s a clean Debian 12 build, much like kootenay, secured and waiting for me to work out the kinks in kootenay’s installation before I put it on an exposed-to-the-world box.

So enough about hardware (I’ll get back to it some day soon) - what’s up with this blog, and this domain? Well, when I retired (2013) I decided to consolidate all the domains that I owned individually and as the LLC, and chose Namecheap as my new home. I’m not sure where I’d heard of them — Jerry Pournelle, maybe — but they became the new home of the consultingsmiths blog among other cunning plans of mine. The blog had been running on Wordpress and back then the owners were less interested in what was posted on it’s code than they are now, and I was comfortable. I had lots of things to play with and WP was just a “typewriter”. That changed a few years ago, and no, I don’t think that I’m bad enough or noticeable enough to attract Matt Mullenweg’s attention, but it felt like Google, Facebook and the old Twitter, just too unlike an Internet that I’d worked to build and wanted to play in, so I jumped ship.

I grabbed the text of most of my posts - at least the decade between 2009-2018, the earlier material has gone missing - and looked for ways to stay in emacs for my blogging. I found org-static-blog and have been using that the last few years. So, the last few days have been devoted to getting this blog back on Namecheap’s servers and getting the ssl certs right, and etc.

‘Nuff for today - glad to be back.