Late again. Seems I’m much to occupied on Fridays to get new posts done.

I’ve been playing Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines. This is an old classic that I have played several times before and still enjoy immensely.
I remember my first character being a brawling Gangrel and going in with almost no foreknowledge of the game-world. And I would say that save for the combat in the (obligatory) sewer level and against the two final bosses, the game is great fun. The underpowered nature of brawling sadly becomes very apparent against said bosses though and detracts from the end game. I remember sneaking past all the enemies in the sewers because I could not be bothered to fight the things.
My second character was a Katana wielding Toreador… going all in on celerity. It was fun and less troublesome than brawling.
This time around I figured I would play a Tremere and actually use the magics to get a different playstyle. I have now played through slightly over 75% of the game now and have still not started to depend on my magics. Indeed, I have not even spent a single XP on disciplines! Instead doing a mix of melee and firearms. That’s unfortunate. But I’m enjoying myself! And that’s the best recommendation that could ever be given to a game!

There were still some problems with the trains this week, but they sorted it out before Wednesday. This would have been A-ok if information was not so shoddy during the weekend, making me think that Monday and Tuesday was business as usual while costing an additional hour or two respectively!

Now. For servers, I closed down some of the inactive VPSes to save on resources. There’s no need to hog disk-space and reserve resources that won’t be used for a good while.
Since I closed the first VPS, I had to set up my VPN all over again. I won’t say it has been directly useful, but that’s because you don’t see what you prevent. But I have used it, so it is definitively a keeper. I have also added instructions on how to set it up to my manual. that manual has reached a couple of pages and has therefore been split to a separate document, separate from my notes and TODOs.

I tried to install Etherpad, and it sucked! Not the pad, the install I mean.
The installation requires node.js, the instructions state clearly that you need it installed but not how to install it. Only that it is best if you compile it from source.
That’s fair, they are developing a collaborative editor and not the node.js library. But it quickly becomes a problem because Etherpad is really picky about it!
Fortunately, there are many guides. Sadly, none of them work! They all show how you can install the dependency, node.js, using the package manager, but then when you get to the final step of trying to start the thing it says that node is not installed.
I tried this several times, formating the VPS to start over from scratch every time, trying several other guides. Same problem.
I found someone with the same problem, according to him, the Etherpad install scripts looks for “node” when it should be looking for “nodejs”. There is just a single comment in this thread that says to check the Etherpad documentation and to compile your own node.js instead. Not helpfull, and I will, and it will suck.
So I manually fix the install scripts so that they look for nodejs instead of node. Now it finds node but says that it needs npm, something that you skip when you install node with the package manager. In retrospect, you could just throw in npm with apt-get and continue from here, but at the time it REALLY seems as though Etherpad insists that you build your own node.js. I know package manager was recommended against but why even list it as an option you are just going to block it down the line? Did someone test these instructions?
So I follow the more complicated instructions that involve building your own node.js from source. Turns out there are dead links to overcome to get the source. Fixed that, sorry, node is still not installed, or is not on in PATH.
Nuke the VPS for the fifth time now and added 2017 to my search query for instructions, found another guide, compile node and install Etherpad and I still get “Please install node.js”.
Found yet another guide to do the same thing. Still fails, at the same spot. Found a mention of something called nodejs-legacy, tried installing that with package manager and tried to run Etherpad. It worked! Now it whines about npm again but at least we have made progress. I tried to apt-get npm and then run Etherpad and now it just plain works! There were lots of warnings about deprecated version, which is rich coming from the thing that demands a legacy version of node to be compiled from latest source! But finally there is something online.
I nuked the server one last time, let’s do this with more grace this time.
Amusingly, along the way I also saw the equivalent instructions for installing on windows and it seems dirt simple.
So when Linux people ever wonder why windows users find Linux so damn frustrating/hard/problematic. This is why. Because even when cheating with reformat (no need to clean up) and using guides that detail every single command to be entered. It still fails and you need to spend hours troubleshooting a third party installer or its dependencies.

Finally. This monday I ran my email through another tester and it pointed out that there was a helo <-> rDNS mismatch, the server has several sub-domain to it but the one in the PTR record does not match the one that postfix was configured to use. I still gor a 10/10 score, but it is such an easy problem so why not fix it.