Captain's Phlog                                                   2020.01.15
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         The Clean White Heat of Nuclear Cataclysm is Your Friend
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Apology:
On or about High Noon UTC on 14 Jan 2020, ~Cow went dark. Sorry. It stayed 
that way for a good twelve hours. While I was certainly the Gavrilo Princip
to my little Archduke Franz Ferdinand of a server, like all great and
infamous acts, I had inspiration. I blame jebug29. Their phlog post of 6 Jan
[1] reminded me why I computer in the first place - Fun & Exploration.

The Heinous Deed:
What was I doing? *checks my browser history* Ah yes, there it is. Two links
down from the latest peppermint.iso - yes it was THAT bad -  is the harmless
looking "enabeling Telnet on Ubuntu" - between them the search for "Ubuntu
stop service xinetd". These are the bullet points to my tale of woe. Somehow
in the mess that was my terminal I managed to take away my permission to use
$ sudo. I couldnt even restart over ssh.

The Fallout:
Being an amateur I chose the obvious course of action to get ~Cow back
online before I found myself on Mateusz' "List of Shame" [2]. I nuked my OS.
I know. I know. Youre crying, "But Tim! You could have simply developed this
clever single line command with seven pipes that I just composed in my head
to make everything right as rain while teaching gnome to brew you up some
chamomile at the same time". Yeah, yeah. It had some benefits though.

Revisionism:
By 7:00 PM EST I found myself with what I've always described as the digital
equivalent of clean underwear. I had a spiffy new system. Since I knew the
Aspire One was now acting solely as a Gopher (and somewhat HTTP) Server I
didn't bother myself with a full install of games, office packages,
proprietary file format support, and the like. I was going lean & mean. I
also decided to switch to Gophernicus from Pygopherd. Now as this post
already makes abundantly clear I'm an amateur at Linux - but when it comes
to Serving Gopher I'm a flaming n00b - so dont take my switch as anything
backed up by great judgment. The thing I didnt like about Pygopherd was that
it's CGI support seemed non-standard to me (my gut speaking here) while
reading about Gophernicus, it seemed to promise a more shallow learning
curve in that regard. One thing I don't like about Gophernicus already, it
SEEMS that certain punctuation marks in my gophermaps give the server the
impression that it's the EOF. I need to learn more about this subtle
feature.

Enjoy:
The new system is Lean & Clean. It runs Gophernicus to serve my GopherHole
and uses $ socat to serve my WWW index.html (which simply points into my
Hole). You will likely find one or two things that I haven't brought back up
yet - my phlog post ranker most notably - but we're getting there.

Peace.
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So ends this Phlog Entry.

[1] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jebug29/log/2020-01/06-0858

[2] gopher://gopher.viste.fr/1/ogup/down

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Bonus Round:
Oblivore: (noun) Someone who doesn't consider where their food comes from.
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