Ah yes that makes sense. I was taken aback by my latest install of freepbx. I feel it wasn’t as aggressive during the Digium days but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

I heard good things about free switch, although it seems like a paradigm change. I’ll have to check it out.

Interesting - why avoid asterisk?

I looked into fusion to play with but I’ve been using asterisk casually since like the 00s with no issues.

What are you trying to understand and what type of project are you looking at? Are you looking to run a program or use a library?

Good documentation to me is here’s how to get this installed, here’s a basic overview of getting started, here’s all the methods/functions with their arguments and a description, and optionally some very basic examples programs to sanity check everything is working ok.

Oh yes! Even better. People having Linux machines just hanging around is rare so I didn’t even consider it.

I did a little looking and found instructions for hosting a matrix server here:

https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/setup/installation.html

Once you get a bit comfortable on the command line give this a try!

Excellent - that site is nice and basic. A good first project.

Seek out some resources on HTML, CSS, basic Linux command line and nginx and start playing around. If you’re on a Mac you can do all this locally then rent a small VPS from digital ocean or the like for about $5/mo to host everything on the web when you’re ready. I can’t speak to options on windows.

On your last comment it looks scary but if we break it down it’s not bad at all.

while true ; do Programs are (super) basically made up of if “this” then do “this stuff”, and while “this thing” do “some stuff”. While true means run this next bit of code (until done) forever.

nc -l -p 80 -c

nc is a program (netcat) that reads/writes data to a network. - in Linux denote options for the program. These are saying listen, listen on port 80, and run a command.

‘echo -e “HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n\n $(date)”’;

The command netcat will run. This is HTTP protocol magicness and $(date) is a Linux command that prints the date.

done Ends the loop

Ez pz.

If you have a Mac you can probably run this in terminal and check out what it does (do take care in running commands from the internet tho).

All good. Learning and exploring is part of the journey! For example hosting a website can be as simple as running a program

(egwhile true ; do nc -l -p 80 -c ‘echo -e “HTTP/1.1 200 OK\n\n $(date)”’; done)

or as complicated as an entire application with multiple databases and processes.

For your first goal - what do you want your website to do? Blog? A bio about yourself? Are you interested in creating the HTML or do you want to focus on getting someone else’s application (eg matrix) up and running?

Do you have more specific goals? Running a home server and website isn’t really programming, more sysadmin work. If you want your website to be a web app that’s a different story.

For arduino work C would be the most directly relatable. It’s a simple language but can be a bit tricky since the language itself doesn’t do much hand holding for you. Arduino does make it a bit easier though.

The C Programming Language is probably the best programming book ever written for any language.

I wound up with gollum. Git based with a wiki format. Works well enough for my limited use.

https://github.com/gollum/gollum

Excellent! Nice work.

I don’t know what dns rebind is but once DNS A records are pointed to the right place then it’s just a matter of setting up the rest of your stuff.

Is that expected? Otherwise check to make sure DNS settings for the domain are correct (eg ns records dig NS example.com IIRC).

First off - you don’t explicitly say so I just want to double check - you’re not using example.com as the actually domain correct?

If not the next thing to do would be to check out what DNS is doing. You can use the dig command to see what IP address is being returned for the domains you’re trying to hit.

dig +trace may be useful as well.

When you copy /home make sure you get the “hidden” files. They start with a “.” and some programs ignore them by default. That’s also where most configuration files are.

Check out rsync -avz

Not who you asked but I have a smartish home. There is no real need. It just affords convenience and for me lands pretty squarely in “hobby” territory.

My lights turn on prior to sunset, and turn off after I go to bed. My porch lights dim at 10pm so I don’t disturb my neighbors as much. I have additional states of lights that are predicated on various scenarios. In short, I never touch a light switch, I never walk into a dark house, and my energy usage is reduced.

My vehicle mileage and tire pressures are reported on a dashboard for me to monitor.

My network statistics are monitored and graphed.

Energy usage of electronics of interest to me are monitored and graphed.

I have a software defined radio that I’m able to use remotely. Using a smart outlet I’m able to turn it on and off remotely as well instead of leaving it on 24/7.

Unfortunately I have a camera that is cloud based my SO uses to monitor pets. Using a smart outlet I turn it on only when we are not home.

Some of this can be accomplished with less smart means, some of it can’t, but it’s been fun to get it all setup.

I like monit. It’s simple to setup and pretty flexible.

https://mmonit.com/monit/

A little bit of a different tack but check out getting into ham radio. There are a lot of kits out there that are reasonably easy to assemble and provide some good documentation on what you’re assembling.

And when you’re done you can talk to people all over the world with what you made!

Man I went to the drive through after work one day, got a few things, and holy shit how is it almost $30?!

Unfortunately these days to get the old prices you have to use their app. Fortunately (at least for me) it works pretty well and it might actually be better value than it used to be.

I did 1300 queries which I think would put it at .007 cents per query. Sounds reasonable to me.

I always fear it comes across that way when I recommend it to people here. I’m just a very happy user and want to see them succeed.

They now have unlimited searches for $10/mo. That’s what got me to try it out.

You are correct though. I really do not like having all of my search history tied to my credit card (and then me). What helps me justify that is that instead of me being the product like google, by paying I’ve become the customer. Hopefully that incentivizes keeping them on the up and up.

I did come across searnxg in this thread. It looks like that can be self hosted so I’m gonna give that a try as well.

Come on over to Kagi! You do have to pay but I use a search engine dozens of times per day so I’m not too bothered by it.