Well, it's adventure time for me!

I spent a little time outside today, putting away the
outdoor furniture. It snowed the other day (and then melted
away) and winter is very close.

Afterwards, I started learning to set up a server. I have a
ThinkPad X120e laptop running Windows that I use for working
with old devices that only have windows drivers and software
(BlackBerry phones in particular). Otherwise, it sits in the
basement collecting dust, since it's quite small (11.6") and
fairly underpowered (AMD E-350 CPU). 

It occurred to me that given it's relative disuse and low
power consumption, it might be a decent server for small
jobs, especially given that circumlunar.space resides on a
VPS with 128MB of RAM! So I've installed Virtualbox with a
Debian netinstall. Right now, it has Apache2 and pygopherd
on it and both are working on my home network. In order to
get external access to the virtual server, I had to set up
port forwarding through the Virtualbox settings. So far so
good.

I've also set up a Dynamic DNS address with DuckDNS -- and
need to decide whether to buy a domain name or just use the
subdomain assigned by DuckDNS. I think I'd like a domain
name, just to keep things consistent over time. Free dynamic
DNS providers seem to come and go.

There are a few more things to set up before the server is
live and accessible from the outside world. The laptop needs
a static IP on my internal network and port forwarding has
to be set up on the router. But that's it.

I'm a little leery about opening up the ports (I don't know
anything about securing a server), so if it turns out that I
don't need much computing power, I may follow solderpunk's
lead and sign up for a VPS, which would help to isolate any
catastrophic events somewhere in a server room far away.

Of course, that will depend on the function of the server,
and I still haven't decided what that will be....