Boggled Mind

I came back from Pune FOSS Meetup (monthly ones usually) today (my first ever). The monthly meetup was nice, interactive, and the room was filled (approx 40-45 of us were there) with youngsters beaming for new things, knowledge, and pretty shy as well. 🪭😳

Onkar, Sriya, Agastya, Prathamesh, Khushi (FOSSUnited) and Joshua (host/Technogise) were very supportive, open and made every one feel very welcomed. It was real nice to be there, got to know a lot.

• Shreya took us through a very interesting topic: Secure & Encrypt your stuff. More: TLS inside a cluster | TLS in Kubernetes: a guide
• Yash took us through Kubernetes & backstage to build a dev portal of our own. More: Backstage-CNCF | Backstage-Source | Red hat article about its inception

What I really liked was that youngsters were filled with thoughts about what FOSS is all about? They were intently listening, even interacting, asking questions, and I saw few take notes. I am bad at remembering names (not faces though), so I am not sure I recall the names (anger management). Anyways, I heard one enthusiast take the name of Joplin, which peaked my height, as being India, and knowing how things go (to a certain extent of course), I liked it and started to pitch for the usage of F-Droid as well, which I was sad to see, hardly anyone knew.

Some knew of AuroraStore as well, and were using it daily. I was pitching more on take control and switch from closed source to open source. I spoke about some nightmares of my rooting experience of more than a decade & half back, which was like a WOAH for me too.

All working individuals were pitching Linux/Unix, which was so nice. I kept cringing about being a non-dev 😜, and liked how we had a good interactive session throughout.

What I found odd, and I have been vocal anyways: usage of google and proprietary stuff a lot by everyone. We need to move out of the GAFAM nonsense and take back our privacy, which I tried to pitch as much as possible. Drumming the R.E.M. Privacy is Scrooge McDuck saving his Lucky Coin from Cruella, Money from Maa Beagle & Beagle Boys.

Another thing I found odd, XMPP is missing from India & FOSS. Start using it too people. 🙂

FYI: I host a lot of stuffs, and own my domain and what not. Start using them, and happy to have that traffic.. --> LibreQR | 4G Search | LibreY Search | PasteBin | Hosts

To wrap this post up...

There were refreshments for everyone and the best part for me; they kept it vegetarian. 👌👌 Overall, I enjoyed being there, and I hope they liked my butting too. 😎🫡

Keeping this small so as not to bore anyone wishing to read this. Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the Bangalore one. Guess, I can do it next year.

Merged with the previous post

SHH

So, this is what I call horrrrrorrr of horrorrsss.. Don't trust me? Try it yourself, when you are not a tech-funkiee.

So, it all started with my mind going open source, few years back. I have been trying hard, but with limited resources, finance being a hurdle and more, I started saving as much to as little as possible, cutting down on a lot of my expenses. It took me around 4 years to gather money up so that I could go for a couple of domains and get them up for the next 10 years at least, while making sure, I save enough for the next 10, and next 10 and so on.

Now, while I was saving money, I was in parallel lookigng for guides and reading through to find out what all are needed. Domain [check], DNS [check], certificates & privacy [check], hosting [woah... no check].

Now, I was aware we needed apache2, virtual hosts, nginx and whatsh** for a lot and all of this, and not to forget, languages (not spoken, but written), html, php, and .....

Anyways, not dragging this one out here, and I will speak of it on my other post in a few days time, back to this post.

For the last 3 weeks, I am kind of glued to my laptop.

HP Notebook from 2014 build year, Li-on battery (heats like hell), i3-5005U CPU, L2 cache, 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD (formatted and am running MX 21.3 since 3 days now), 248GB SSD (currently running W11, fully modified, no cr**), KVM disabled, Intel 5500 Graphics, and the long list. You get the gist, I am sure.

What has been eating me is this: I paid for unlimited (even though shared hosting), and now everything has been limited, badly. I can run very limited stuff, and that too if one job runs, and has say number of processes, the system automatically gets overrun and a lot of other things stop, ruined, messed up.

Anyways, so, I went over to internet, and searched and searched, and searched. Was getting very difficult to find me resources which cater to either something in recent times, and something which can at least give me basic idea and steps to run things.

I found few sites, few blog posts, few even detailed guides, but 90% of those were related either to only Windows based hosting, and or Ubuntu/Debian Server based hosting. There were many CentOS/Rhel etc based as well, but they were so aged, that even older generation would call it the era of eons...

Now, while I had in mind what I needed, I am not a technical person at core. I understand concepts, I can read and probably modify codes to make things work, but if you get tooooo technical, I will either ask questions, or might jump to my own understanding, thereby messing it up completely(unfortunately at times), and other places where I can find the right information at the appropriate time.

So, 3 nights back, or rather 4 nights to be precise at the time of writing this paragraph, I started fiddling with my MX OS, and did soooo many things as guided here, even though it is old, it is the only one I could find with proper guidance and mentioning with details, thereby helping me get some understanding. Mind it, I had this site with me for the last 4 weeks, but I was trying to get a proper linux build to try it on. The horrors of that and more during the MX setup is another story and for some other post.

So, I started fiddling, and went on and on with everything that I could get from those steps, as I do understand a bit of terminal(ogy), and can glide through it, with much of it not requiring a hand. When I finally thought at 0128 hours my time that I finally had done it, is when I stumbled upon more stupidity in life. My sample site though had everything in place was still not showing up, and instead, I found another stuff gawking at me with all its might..

Imagine my state. I was anyways tired, been working the whole day and then taken to this plate of self-hosting surge of energy, I worked from 20:40-21:00 and at 0128 hour the final hour made me lose it. Fed up, I got so irritated, I went to various sites trying to get a solution to it. Alas, my boding went till 0350, when I finally gave up and finallllly went to get some sleep.

What did I fumble onto, which made my life so horrific for the next 2-2.5 hours? What led me to go on still, and kind of stay up to find a solution no matter what for those 2+ hours?

Ohh, and what about my reaction, my understanding, of the final output at 01:28 hours? What was it?

Find out this and more on the part II of this mind boggling thread (coming soon).

Keep a tap on this post for the linkage and updates.

Till then, keep your mind free to be more boggled later on!!!

#### Updated: 25.06.2023

So, the horror stood me up on my path and left me astray. Finally 2 weeks ago, I gave up all the hope of self-hosting from my home.

Chasers upon chasers, static IP always routing through to sub-router and the NOC team were never able to solve it.

That shows, what level of study they did and what level of knowledge I have. I was guiding them the whole time and explaining to them why something was happening.

So, my local ISP did give me a static IP, however, for reasons they were never able to find, the IP was routing to the middle router and not opening up WWW for me. No amount of port forwarding, or for that matter no amount of headaches made it any simpler, or was even able to resolve it.

The only time it would open up was when it was on Dial-UP or ADSL mode (direct PPPoE) and not via router PPPoE, MSDL, or even Wi-Fi Route.

I and one of the local team member banged our heads for almost 3-4 weeks (and you know, hardly anyone works after 6PM, or that the tea breaks are for 1 hour and lunch breaks are for 2 hours). I have my office work too, and blah blah blah...

Anyways, after going over so many trial-error methods (almost 12-15 times we tried in various manners), that the local guy gave up and me too started trending for me.

So, the part of all this brick in the wall is: My Self-Hosting can only work, or let me put it this way, can only be tried again if I meet at least the below stated criteria:

*New ISP, probably some company that has a better NOC team members *New Laptop (my current one is a mess, and may go dead any day now) *Rather, a desktop, which can be a better choice (my first ever was an assembled one, and I still have few things from that desktop) *Money.... The biggest trouble for me since ages. Taxes are eating up most of my income and I am not getting any younger anyways...

Anyways, Adios on this one for now!!!