April 9, 2020

Insomniac Discoveries covid-19: day 28 | US: GA | info | act

Insomniac again. I can’t turn my brain off. If I wake up to pee, that’s it: I’m up for hours. My brain usually makes much more of something at 2am than it would at 2pm. This morning, it was my mother. I spoke her a bit last night on FaceTime, and she starts complaining about her health insurance. I listen for a bit, and commented something like “yes, health insurance is awful in the country and will remain so as long as we keep voting for the wrong people.” Yes, it was needlessly provocative. Yes, I should have just silently commiserated. Yes, I’m tired of old people messing up this country for the young ones. Yes, she remains obdurate, despite evidence that’s right in front of her face. I find it infuriating, and I don’t want to speak with her. So my brain ruminates in the dark of night.

Not helping, I usually reach for my iPad. After a peruse of Instagram, Reddit often provides a bit of distraction—innocuous posts about things that are mildly interesting. Sometimes, however, I’ll stumble upon something that gets me going even more. Last night was this post on installing and securing Nextcloud. It’s not Nextcloud that was interesting, but the discussion about securing it using a reverse proxy. This is exactly what I was looking for the other day—I just didn’t know what it was called. My install of Nextcloud is on my Synology and was using ports 80 and 443, but I wanted those ports for my new Pi webserver. I just ended up moving the ports that the Synology uses, but the reverse proxy would have been a better solution. It still might be. This tutorial page from the discussion might be just what I need; I think it would work well on my Pihole server. Yeah, another linux project.

I also found directions for installing multiple instances of MediaWiki. I have an old database, called LitWiki, that I used over several years in several different classes that I might install. I’d be curious to see what we were working on.

That reminds me, too, that I have an old drive I used for backups probably still sitting in the server room of the university. We primarily used this for a Moodle server, but it might have other goodies I could use again, like backup scripts. I’m going to have to see if I can get access to it sometime.

Another lovely evening on the porch. The weather today was perfect.