Self-hosting a forum with Discourse

What do you do if you want a private social media experience for you and friends or family? Facebook has Groups, and lesser-known apps like Band exist that can also fill that niche, but you’re still handing over all your content to a 3rd party. For some, that’s untenable, and completely understandable. Furthermore, I wouldn’t have anything of interest to write if the answer was “Make a Group. Now set it to Private....

2020-07-14 · 7 min · Stephan Garland

Windows Upgrades Gone Wild

I use Windows at home as a gaming platform. I’ve used a Mac laptop (a 2013 Air I purchased in, if I recall, 2016, and now from my job, a Pro) for everything else since I got it, but it’s still difficult to beat Windows for gaming. And let’s be honest, Windows 7 was pretty decent for a desktop OS. Windows 10 definitely had and continues to have its growing pains, but I’ve come around to it....

2020-07-10 · 6 min · Stephan Garland

Why does it say paper jam when there is no paper jam?!

OK, this is actually about Docker and disk space, but close enough. While trying to download ultra high definition Linux ISOs, I encountered an error from Transmission, running in Docker: “No space left on device.” Odd, considering I was pretty sure I had a few TB free. Let’s see if the logs have anything useful to say (also, yes, I checked around the lines in question to see if there was other information):...

2020-07-08 · 4 min · Stephan Garland

Home Networking Is A Dumpster Fire

Not exactly SRE/DevOps, but I need to write something, so here we are. Also, while I receive no kickbacks from anyone, and don’t have sponsored links, I am definitely being a cheerleader for Ubiquiti here. It’s not exactly a secret that consumer networking equipment is hot garbage. Back in the day of the WRT54G, it honestly wasn’t that bad, but it’s hard to say if the reliability was a result of the simpler hardware and software, or the far fewer clients per AP - IoT wasn’t really a thing in the early 2000s....

2020-05-25 · 6 min · Stephan Garland

I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore, or how to move to EC2

This is not a blog entry on how to move Lightsail content to EC2, as those guides already exist in AWS’ fantastic documentation. This is about my trials and tribulations in getting it up and running, and how I fixed a niggling problem I’ve had since the beginning of this blog (and the other sites running alongside it). Past readers will note that that I’ve had issues with this site running alongside its siblings....

2020-01-20 · 5 min · Stephan Garland