I lately dedicated some time to setting up my own substitute server for Guix on a foreign distribution. This post is about that experience, after verifying that such a process is currently quite underdocumented. A substitute server is clearly a required step in order to cultivate a personal or unofficial/alternative channel for Guix, at least if one has more than one box (and possibly one physical location) to manage.
I recently bought a basic NAS for home use. The NAS is a nice Terramaster F2-425, which is a very basic RAID1-only NAS with a decent CPU and 2.5Gb network. Terramaster allows users to either use its custom Linux-based TOS or install any other operating system supported by the x86_64-based platform. Note that this model does not mount any NVME unit for the OS, as for the F2-424.
Following a post detailing my email setup across multiple personal boxes, I'll summarize an outline of my approach for managing data across multiple workstations and individual profiles in this post. This system (or collection of tools and workflow) has evolved over time and continues to adapt to various needs and scenarios, offering high flexibility and control for my use cases.
Being an ancient mariner in the virtual ocean of the Big Network, I started using emails at the very beginning of the Internet era (at least here in Italy) on a SunOS pizza box, which I used at the time as my primary workstation. That was a giant step ahead for me because my first serious use of email in 1991 was on a Digital VT220 terminal under VMS OS and its MAIL client (who remembers the old times of DCL?). At that time, I started using Elm as my Mail User Agent, a software that stopped being developed in the first few years of this millennium.