[kwlug-disc] Documenting your digital life

[John Van Ostrand]

On Tue, May 20, 2025 at 4:04 PM CrankyOldBugger <crankyoldbugger at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I originally had all my tips and tricks stored in my Synology NAS's Notes
> app.  Had accumulated many notes over the years.  But lately the app has
> been unreliable, so I uploaded everything, one note at a time, to my
> personal website.  However, my access to this website has been shaky
> lately, so I installed NextCloud on a handy Raspberry Pi 5 and started
> downloading/uploading everything from the website to NextCloud's Notes app.
>

I used a WD MyBook for over a decade replacing harddisks as they failed
(and having to use a Russian source for firmware.) When we bought the
cottage I decided to get something better. I bought a Synology single disk
solution, low end. As it turned out too low end. I replaced it with a Raspi
5, OpenMediavault, USB disk enclosure (a Startech that had a rocker switch
so it would be on after a power outage,) and a spinning disk. It's way
faster and more featureful than Synology.


> But, being someone who is still learning NextCloud, I've bahookee'd my
> Notes a couple of times now.  So I have stuff stored all over the place.
>
> A decent wiki would be nice.  I could find another Raspberry Pi around
> here that's looking bored and host it there.  What do you recommend for a
> self-hosted wiki?
>

As a career sysadmin and system integrator I don't like paying someone for
things I can readily do myself. That means self-hosting everything. The
only things I outsource are DNS (free from Canspace, with registration) and
mail (mostly for spam filtering, it's too time-consuming to do myself, and
it's best done on a large scale.)
So it's really up to your existing savvy in sysadmin or your ability and
desire to learn.

To set up a wiki you'll need to know how to set up a web server and follow
the instructions for the wiki to setup a virtualhost on the web server.
It's not a lot of work. Then you have to learn wiki markup, which is
different for each wiki.

I wouldn't be surprised if OpenMediaVault has a wiki package. You could
also get a docker image for Dokuwiki or another wiki. Then you'd have to
know docker administration. At least with Docker you'd be able to do things
like upgrade with ease. I run one set of docker containers to pull
telemetry from my EV.

Finally, you'd want to know a little about where it stores so you can back
it up or look at it offline.

So pick what you want to learn. Docker might be something useful going
forward.

-- 
John Van Ostrand
At large on sabbatical
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