Boy, things have gotten pretty weird lately. About halfway through May, I learned that I'll need more licenses for EaseUS (to manage Windows backups). Also had to delay a demo meeting with Cisco, pertaining to CUCM/WebEx. Wanted to add Tor nodes and Matterbridge to the project (as Docker containers), only for the potential risks of the former and complications (between Discord and Nextcloud chat) of the latter to dissuade me on the limited value/returns I'd receive. Days later (05/15), Windows 10 Enterprise refused to install on the Threadripper. Slightly after that (05/19), I find out that Ms left their free MBR-to-GPT conversion tool out of Windows Server 2016 - necessitating the purchase of another software license (AOMIE). On 05/21 (midnight), I moved to Nextcloud 22.2.8, in preparation for the move to version 23. On that same day, the air quality was so bad that I couldn't run the server later. It stayed off until the 26th iirc. During that time, I re-realised that I'll need a rackmount AC at some point in the future (had already looked into it before). Between May 27 and 29, I was updating Portainer and purchasing my current domain from Freenom, outright. Also considered hosting an Invidious instance. During the May/June transition, I had to move my mobile devices from StraightTalk to T-Mobile, because the former decided to drop support for the Asus ZenFone 6. They also decided that their VoLTE implementation didn't need to support said device. And they had a nerve to waste my time (days of it) with poor customer service as I tried and failed to transfer my phone number to T-Mobile (to go easy on people's contacts lists). Needless to say, Google Voice is the only reason that didn't end up becoming a complete mess. I stopped giving out my real phone number a while ago, because telephone companies don't have to play nice. At least T-Mobile has better customer service from what I've seen. On June 2nd, I was supposed to look into group policy to reduce Windows 10 telemetry - but got sidestepped by a potential File Explorer bug! On June 4th, I did more research on the requirements for Matterbridge and YaCy Grid. Matterbridge was going to require a ton of work, for something that I'd probably get little-to-no use out of. YaCy Grid is not ready for prime time, and the current config examples only show off Elastisearch. Not to say that they haven't been working on it, but I'd have to build most of it by hand, which would devour time required for other tasks already planned. The Tor node ended up getting scrapped as well, due to potential risks of hosting said instance. The only thing that survived all of that was the desire to get vanilla Yacy running. On June 7th, I finally managed to give away the Threadripper, freeing up rackspace and the Titan V. On the 10th, I was looking into Docker for Windows containers (no, not that one - the other one with less cringe), for hosting multiple isolated instances of MariaDB. Today, the update to Chromium v102 reigned down on my setup with SSL pains and the terror of frantically scrambling to download/install certificates, while being forced to switch some instances back to HTTP because self-signed certificates are everywhere and sometimes tough to replace. And establishing a proper, self-hosted CA that won't drain you of your funds is tough. Between all of these, I was battling with tight finances because or a college loan and a certificate loan, and stupidly poor air quality due to temperatures+humidity+allergens preventing me from turning on the server (software and driver updates have to happen sometime). This weekend, I was originally supposed to be 1) configuring group policy for restricting Ms telemetry, and 2) setting up a YaCy instance. It's 4am. I still have a ToDo list to update!
/endrant
I need to update my project thread as well....