Welcome to the new world order know as Corona Virus. We are fortunate to live in a spread-out city, and then live in the ‘burbs on top of that, so we are mainly facing annoyances, not hardships. I will take that any day.
The image is from the our grocery store. That isle normally has paper products like toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, etc. Been empty for about two weeks now.
My $JOB told us all to go full time work from home for the duration this past Monday. This was not a big deal for me as I already do that two days a week, and in the past I have done it full time. The biggest issue is that the kids and the misses are home from school as well. They should be starting the new school on Monday, all on-line.
The logistics of getting the teachers ready are hard. Harder still is making sure the students have all that they need. While for most of the kids in the district, this will not be an issue was we do live in a fairly well off part of the world, however there are kids who will have issues with things like no access to a computer (or a home!), language barriers, or other challenges to learning. I know our district is trying to help all the students, but I worry about the other districts without the resources we have.
Upside for me? Well, more time with the family, more time for projects both on-line and off-line. It could be worse, I hope it will not get there.
Take care, check in on people, keep your distance until told otherwise, and wash your hands!
So, it has been about two months since I wrote Path to Self-Hosting so I figured it was time for a check-in.
As a refresher, here is the list of services I came up with (I will probably add more):
- Email, both storage and web-access
- Document storage
- Media (Music and Videos)
- Source control (git).
- Calendar
- Contacts
- Password management
So, how am I getting on? Let’s take a look.
I am still using GMail as my main mailbox, but I am trying to stay away from the web interface as much as I can. A long time ago, I set up mbsync to sync my GMail down to my laptop, and I use mutt to read emails from there. There are some emails which really need a GUI version to read it (mainly marketing type things), so I have a script to open it in FireFox.
I have been looking into places I can move my mailbox, but I need to figure out if I want to trust a third-party like Proton Mail or my hosting provider DreamHost, or if I want to stand up a mail server on a VPS somewhere.
I got an email from Google which told me that the promotional period on some storage was expiring, which got me to move everything personal out of Google Drive into my NextCloud server I run at home. I have to leave some things there as I use it as a file storage for an group I help run.
My NextCloud server has been given a bit of attention. I upgraded it to 17.0.2 and converted the SQL storage from SQLite to MariaDB. Things seem to be going well with that. I also switched the docker container image from the NextCloud one to the one provided by LinuxServer.io. They do a good job of packaging up images and providing a common way to manage and configure their docker images. I have switched over all my images to use theirs where I can.
Next steps here are to upgrade to NextCloud Hub 18, which is the latest release, and to get everybody else in the house storing their files on the NextCloud sever.
Back before there was stable and wide-spread music streaming services, I had managed to amass a large-ish music collection which I used various local clients to play. Once I decided to ditch Google Play Music, I needed a way to get play my music where ever. Enter Airsonic, a music streaming server I can run under docker here at the house. For my phone, I am using an application called Dsub (F-Droid) which lets me cache the music on my phone so I can play it without using the phone’s data connection.
My next step here is to take the playlists I made in Play Music and port them over to AirSonic. I will also need to purchase some of the songs I am missing.
I have been running an instance of Gitea for a while. It is a great basic git repo with web-front end. I have been playing with GitLab at work and I might want to try it out. Yeah for docker making it easy!
Calendaring will present some of a challenge as I need to be able to see and update the family’s calendars, and everybody else is using Google. I should write a post on what I am doing, but I am basically syncing down the Google calendar stuff, and then syncing it with my NextCloud server.
To view and edit my calendars, I am using something called ikhal which is part of the khal suite which is a CLI calendaring app.
If I need a GUI, then I use the calendaring app in NextCloud.
I am planning on using something called khard which is another CLI app which will integrate with my calendar syncing solution, and my email client of choice, mutt.
I have been using a CLI tool called pass for a long time now. It stores its entries on the local disk using GPG encryption per file. It also supports git, so I have it stored in my gitea instance. I can also access it on my phone which is nice.