Pebcak [DOT] Club Recap: From FreeBSD, BastilleBSD to GMID.

How to manage your own capsule on Vultr VPS, with FreeBSD and GMID as server inside a BastilleBSD jail: the pebcak way!

> 📢 this gemlog became huge. I tried to read, fix, and verify it but inaccuracies can be everywhere, please if you find them do not hesitate to contact me I'll try to verify and fix them as soon as possible, thanks! 🙏

Things to be aware of, before to start

Hi folks, here is the always delayed guide I ought to the Gemini community, and to anyone is interested to have its own capsule. This guide is a walking-through for anyone has zero knowledge of Information Technology but still want to be proactive, independent and free!

Bye Bye Linux

> This guided is designed for FreeBSD 😈

If you are looking for the usual Linux guide/tutorial this gemlog is not for you, but if you are looking for a practical way to manage your own — perhaps first — Capsule over a VPS, and you don't have any prior experience with any of FreeBSD and Linux, I recommend you to stay here and to read why I prefer using FreeBSD instead of Linux.

How it is organized this guide

This guide has been divided in four sections, in my opinion this helps to have all the information well formatted and condensed in short pages rather than in one single endless document; this is also useful for older machines with limited memory.

These are the sections:

Personal Comments

Setting the Vultr VPS

Setting FreeBSD, BastilleBSD and GMID

Tips and Tricks

What won't be addressed in this guide

There are topics that are connected to this guide, but aren't necessary to build a Gemini server on a VPS.

No "registrar"

Even though I tried to be the most comprehensive as possible, I won't tell you how to connect your domain (if you have one) to Vultr, connecting your domain to the VPS depends by your registrar, please refer to its documentation to learn how to do it.

No HTML

This guide is Gemini only, I won't describe any method to how setup and run a web server. If you think that you want serving also a website — as a matter of fact many Geminauts do have multiple services like Gemini, Gopher, HTTP — I recommend to looking for other guides.

If you want HTML so badly…

If you want serve HTML as well I recommend you to spin up a VPS based on OpenBSD, and to use HTTPD as Web Server and VGER or GMNXD as Gemini server. All you need to know is listed below:

OpenBSD official page

HTTPD(8) System Manager's Manual

OpenBSD Amsterdam (VPS Provider)

VGER: gemini server written in C used with INETD

GMNXD: gemini server for OpenBSD

Httpd and Relayd Mastery (book)

Further recommendations

Even though I tried, as much as I could, to make this guide easy to read and follow by anyone, it doesn't mean that you don't need to read and study all the documentation available.

I recently read "Absolute FreeBSD" by MWL and I understood that working as sysadmin is not for me, nonetheless it is still required a little bit of knowledge to handle a computer from just the terminal.

Absolute FreeBSD

So please, read, study and practice as much as you can!

Table of contents

The introduction is finished read through the links in this very order:

1. Comments on why I recommend a VPS, FREEBSD and GMID.

2. Setting a very basic VPS with Vultr

3. Setting FreeBSD and GMID

4. Tips & Tricks

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