Believe it or not, I'm working on it.

1. (HIGH) Continue to attempt to reestablish Vestertopian-Mongolian diplomatic relations

1. (low) Investigate possible use to help in the reestablishment of Vestertopian-Mongolian diplomatic relations if doing so through Datacom continues to bear no fruit

1. Migrate website to Linode

1. I dunno, nothing comes to mind at the moment... seems to be fine as it is

1. Make sure final backups of everything from it have been made
2. Wipe everything off of it
3. Remove the machine's entry from DNS
4. (low) Cancel account

1. (HIGH) Install/configure FreeBSD
2. (HIGH) Install/configure various tools
3. Migrate at least websites of most or all Vesterdomains to it (from Namecheap or in some cases potentially directly from HostPapa)

1. (low) Automate copying backups of its local source repository to offsite locations
2. (low) Automate copying backups of the machine in general to offsite locations
3. (low) Investigate and fix or bypass moreutils wackiness (currently forgoing use of ifne due to this)
4. (low) Look into something like smartmon
5. (low) Oooooh, nvim's default (?) color stuff is a lot nicer than I'm used to on my local systems - investigate how they're doing it

1. (low) Consider migrating email for most or all Vesterdomains to it (from Namecheap or in some cases potentially directly from HostPapa)

1. (low) Migrate the website to Linode from Namecheap

1. (low) Migrate the website to Linode from Namecheap

1. (low) Migrate the website to Linode from Namecheap

1. (low) Migrate the website to Linode from Namecheap

1. (HIGH) Continue to serve your Vesterman needs
2. (low) Migrate the website to Linode from Namecheap

1. Figure out how (if possible) to make the underlying file structure similar to all the others so I don't keep screwing it up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
2. (low) Think about whether and how to best migrate off of Namecheap (perhaps only partially)

1. (low) Migrate the website to Linode from Namecheap

1. (HIGH AND SEXY) Sexily continue sexily being sexy
2. (low but sexy) Sexily migrate the sexy website to Linode

1. (low) Migrate the website to Linode from Namecheap

1. Email sent from it (via Proton) works fine, but email sent to it winds up at the default address on Namecheap
2. (low) Migrate website to Linode from Namecheap

1. (HIGH) Continue to protect vital Vestertopian infrastructure and national secrets
2. (low) Migrate website to Linode from Namecheap

1. (low) Migrate the website to Linode from Namecheap

1. (HIGH) Continue to attempt to reestablish Vestertopian-Mongolian diplomatic relations

Various minor tweaks and such for getting the Namecheap server in shape.

Next main high-level thing (besides continuing to serve your Vesterman needs, sexily continuing to sexily be sexy, continuing to protect vital Vestertopian infrastructure and national secrets, and continuing to attempt to reestablish Vestertopian-Mongolian diplomatic relations): Get websites and some other stuff migrated from Namecheap to Linode.

Noticeable changes will be slow at this point (well, yeah, yeah, I know... but I mean slower than they have been thus far). It will take some time to get the Linode server in the shape I desire, even before migrating the websites and such, and even then they will be migrated more or less as they currently are (i.e. mostly barebones). The direct goal in this, as I've mentioned before, is to get myself "real" control over the domains, as opposed to needing to worry about Webuzo or something like it; in my experience, I always wind up finding those kinds of things counterproductive, as I'm always fighting against them. In fairness to Webuzo (and things like it), I want to explicitly say here that I consider that mostly due to my own tedious psychological issues rather than really due to Webuzo or whatever.

Anyway, after that, I intend to work on a big redesign/modernization of the internal behind-the-scenes stuff, which will take quite some time but at least in theory will enable me to more easily, more quickly, and (probably most importantly) less full-of-despair-at-the-idea-of-making-pretty-much-any-change-at-all-given-the-state-of-my-ancient-behind-the-scenes-stuff-ily make changes that I've long wanted to have made, but have for just as long been full of despair at the idea of actually making (given the state of my ancient behind-the-scenes stuff).

The intended first noticeable change after all (or at least a select subset) of that is getting the historical records of Food Club up to date. I certainly might make other noticeable changes here and there before that, and even before completing the big behind-the-scenes redesign/modernization, but I imagine it would be limited to (A) emergencyesque changes and (B) trivial little stuff that might strike my fancy once in a while.

Unfortunately, this will require people to accept invites to the new list (which I will send out shortly), and perhaps alter any spam whitelisting kind of things that they have.

• Dumb
• Lazy
• Ignorant
• Tired
• Picky
• Paranoid
• Frustrated
• Concerned
• Impatient
• Annoyed
• Defeatist
• (other)

So, change of plans! I spent a little time investigating external email list services, and wound up thinking that Groups.io seems OK, or possibly even good. Signed up for an account there, made a group, and some little config stuff. Asked it to send out email invites to myself and the IEAFCEELG so that I could test it out.

Unfortunately, neither I nor the IEAFCEELG have received those invites. Looking into it a little further, I noticed that some of the functionality (like starting a new topic via the website) just says "This group has not yet been approved. Once it has been approved, you will be able to post to it."

Looking into it even further, I found stuff saying that the Groups.io people give some sort of manual inspection of every new group before they'll allow it, I guess just to make sure it's not obviously intended to conflict with their terms of service. This is commonly claimed to take "up to 24 hours". So, I guess it'll probably be approved tomorrow.

I have high hopes!

I have replaced each of the two high-priority items of the form "Automate offsite backups of (something)", where (something) is either "its local source repository" or "the machine in general", and where in turn "it" and "the machine" both refer to the new (i.e. Namecheap) server, with two items, those being:

• (HIGH) Automate backups of (something)
• (low) Automate copying backups of (something) to offsite locations

I then did both of the new high-priority items, leaving only the two new low-priority items. That is, I automated backups, but locally to the machine, and I did not automate copying those backups to some external place or places.

For now, I'll just periodically copy the backups offsite manually.

As I predicted in the previous update, there are a few little things that I've discovered aren't working as I would expect, and I imagine I'll continue to find such things every once in a while. But I believe it has reached the point where everything is mostly OK, and I can fix or work around any remaining issues without much hassle as I encounter them.

Nearly done with this. Or at least done-ish; there are a few little things that I've discovered aren't working as I would expect, and I imagine I'll continue to find such things every once in a while. But I believe it will soon reach the point where everything is mostly OK, and I can fix or work around any remaining issues without much hassle as I encounter them.

Also installed some not-typically-default programs that I frequently use, so that muscle memory stops working against me (e.g. ripgrep so that I can just type "rg blah" instead of typing "rg blah", getting an error message, sighing, and typing "grep blah").

Got the source for GNU Mailman 3. Was disappointed to see it's written (at least largely) in Python, which I find somewhat awful (meaningful whitespace, beyond like simply "the thing before the whitespace is a different thing than the thing after the whitespace", seems to me to be a horrible concept to put in a programming language). Oh well.

Discovered that the "Installing" part of the official "Installing and running Mailman 3" doc that I found yesterday is... let's say not terribly explicit. Found these, which at least at first glance seem better:

• virtualenv Installation" (official, and "a step-by-step installation guide for Mailman Suite")
• Mailman 3 installation experience, by someone who has done this several times

Also possibly of some use, despite being for a different OS, being described (by the "Mailman 3 installation experience" author) as "not maintained", and having been updated six years ago to say that it "is now 1-1/2 years old", is Mailman 3 Setup Using Ubuntu Bionic. Looks like it contains a good amount of detail, though, so I'm adding it to this list just in case.

Am tired. Will resume later.

The existing mailing list manager (on the old server, i.e. HostPapa) is GNU Mailman version 2.1. Version 2.* is end-of-life, and will receive no updates beyond critical fixes and the like. I haven't yet looked at the details closely, but it seems like upgrading an existing list from version 2 to version 3 is a pretty manual process.

There is no version of GNU Mailman installed on the new server (i.e. Namecheap). Moreover, although Webuzo has lots of click-to-install things for a whole bunch of applications, there's none for GNU Mailman (neither version 2 nor 3). There are click-to-install things for various things that are described as mailing list managers, but these seem to be intended more for unidirectional spamblasting (or, presumably, more legitimate unidirectional mailing lists) than for multidirectional conversational lists. I don't know for certain that none of them have conversational support, but at the very least their brief overviews sure seem focussed on unidirectional blasting.

There's a yum (or apt or dnf or whatever it's called) package for GNU Mailman 3 appropriate to the new server's OS (AlmaLinux 9), so I suppose I could install that. I'm not a big user of Linux, though, so I don't feel comfortable enough to immediately judge the reputability of any particular y/a/d/w package repository. So, I guess I could investigate that first, but I also guess that I could just build from source.

So, the high-level plan as regards a mailing list manager (which I intend to start acting upon fairly soon) is something like:

1. Namecheap: Build GNU Mailman 3 from source.
   • Backup plan: Investigate the y/a/d/w package repository, and if seemingly reputable, install GNU Mailman 3 via that.
   • Backup backup plan: Uhhhhhh, keep looking, perhaps for another way to get it up and running or perhaps for an entirely different mailing list manager (in the sense of my personal understanding of the term).
   • Backup backup backup plan: I could always go back to the way I handled this sort of thing in the decades of yore, by writing my own cheesy and poorly thought-out bespoke mailing list manager.
2. Namecheap: Configure whatever that winds up being, and test it out with a new and temporary little mailing list.
3. HostPapa: Export all configuration, archive data, etc. from the existing GNU Mailman 2 list.
4. Namecheap: Assuming that export can be reasonably imported into the new mailing list manager, try that. Again, in the case of GNU Mailman 3, it seems like this is possible but pretty manual.
   • Backup plan: Forget about importing; rebuild and configure the list from scratch and forget about making the archives available (at least for the foreseeable future).

Some links that seem like they might be useful:

• Installing and running Mailman 3
• Discussion thread about intra-GNU-Mailman migration: "migrate MM3 list from an old server to a new one". Note: The apparently successful migration also included some MM2 to MM3 parts, and the thread has some details on that, too.
• Migrating from Mailman 2.1 to Mailman 3

The advantage to Namecheap is that it should be relatively quick for me to get some bare-bones stuff up and running. The disadvantage (at least for me personally) is that a lot of functionality is hidden behind a user-friendly GUI "control panel" (Webuzo) whereas I would greatly prefer low-level control via a CLI. In the interest of not being misleadingly unfair to Namecheap, I want to say that they actually do give me low-level CLI access. The issue isn't really "Can I get low-level access"; rather, it's more "Can I use that low-level access without inadvertently breaking something that the GUI control panel is already handling."

I'd also like to say that I don't mean Webuzo is bad; it's fine, and I'm sure it's actually significantly better for many people. Not for me, though; I always wind up fighting against things like it, and so except in the quick-and-dirty short-term bare-bones sense, they always wind up being counterproductive for me.

The advantage to Linode (again, at least for me personally) is that I can install my preferred OS (FreeBSD) and easily use my other preferred tools (such as using Caddy instead of Apache as the web server), and I don't have to worry about fighting some tool I don't actually want to have in the first place.

There are a couple disadvantages to Linode. First, it's going to take me longer to get something up and running on it, simply because doing so will be more manual. But the other main disadvantage is that (at least by default) they don't allow you to run a mail server on your site. This is probably wise of them, as mail servers are pretty complicated. So, at least for the medium term, I will still be using Namecheap for mail-related purposes even after I've migrated the websites to Linode. My pie-in-the-sky plan for handling the mail involves migrating it off of Namecheap and to Proton, but that's at best a plan for the long term.

With all that said, the current state of things is that for most Vesterdomains, I have set them up on Namecheap.

Email support on Namecheap is done (mostly, with one important exception, mentioned below). That was the thing I needed to get done the most urgently; email (among other things) suddenly became unusable for hours or even days at a time at my horrible, horrible web hosting company, and email is... pretty important.

Website support on Namecheap is done in the sense that I can (and in some cases have) quickly get little web pages up for any Vesterdomain. This is likely the way it's going to stay, at least for a while; like I said earlier, I'm going to move this kind of thing to Linode, so as a temporary short-term thing before then, I'm just going to have a few little bare-bones pages.

The next tasks I have immediately planned are (1) making this very page look slightly less embarrassing than it currently does, (2) getting those little bare-bones pages up for all (or at least most) Vesterdomains, (3) investigating the current status of a few as-of-yet unhandled Vesterdomains and dealing with them, and (4) resolving that "one important exception" related to email. Specifically:

One Vesterdomain, FoodClub.us, has long had a mailing list that some of us use to help plan upcoming Food Clubs. The recent extra-horribleness of my horrible, horrible web hosting company killed this (and other things), or at least made it unacceptably unreliable. So, I want to migrate the mailing list to Namecheap.