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/