I'm in south-western Pennsylvania in the US. I'm into VR, and enjoy other games too like Diablo, Runescape, and even made my own controllers for Dance Dance Revolution and Sound Voltex.

I like self-hosting services. The first thing I hosted was a World of Warcraft private server, back in the days of Antrix, Ascent, ArcEmu, MaNGOS, and the fun drama between all of those emulators. I started out with a repack, but it didn't take long for me to get into compiling from source with Tortoise SVN and I think Visual Studio Express since it was free. Eventually I went to Linux.

I've dabbled with Linux on and off mostly out of interest in getting better performance in games on an Acer TravelMate 2480 with Intel 950GMA graphics, and was a part of Intel Sans Soldiers Frontier (9xxSSF) modded driver team (I provided IEGD packages). When Windows 10 came out, my interest shifted towards privacy, FOSS, and self-hosting, and that's when I went all-in with Linux.

I used to store OS set-up notes as text files on a flash drive. I then moved those text files over to GitHub, and shortly to GitLab. Someone I think on Reddit suggested I host the notes on a wiki, and that's when I found DokuWiki. While I was figuring out Linux, I took a lot of notes.

At some point I was hosting a public Xonotic, Minetest, Battle.net for Diablo II and Warcraft III, and WoW server, along with a forum, Mumble, and XMPP server. Had various sites for my own use too; a GNU social instance, GNU MediaGoblin for videos, something for pictures (not sure what initially but I switched from Lychee to ZenPhoto at some point), a Joomla landing page, Wordpress blog, and even calendar and contacts sync. I did it all from source, and also came up with fun systemd scripts to automatically update all of that, daily, and unattended; mainly git pulls for the sites, and compiling for the game servers. And with all of that came more notes 🙂

The primary driving force for me back then was trying to host a WoW server that was different than all the rest, by having a large degree of transparency with how things were configured, reporting issues upstream (I did this before ChromieCraft was a thing), and making it actually secure with HTTPS sign-up sites and forums and 2FA on WoW even; it was shocking how many insecure repack servers were around back then. I was for sure one of the first WoW servers that hopped on Let's Encrypt. That, paired with a lot of distro-hopping and needing modularity, had my notes take on a style that generally lets me re-deploy services and configurations in a reproducible manner, and would allow mostly anyone to copy/paste commands to do a similar set-up.

I took a break from gaming after a while and shut the game servers down and kept my personal sites up, and eventually things got busy in life to where I didn't have time to properly re-deploy most of my sites after an OS upgrade. I've made sure my DokuWiki instance was up and available the entire time though.

I can't think of a better term (community? space?), but I hosted all my services under the name "Realm of Espionage", realm coming from back when I first hosted WoW servers. And with that creativity, I called my wiki "RoE | Wiki" 🤑

My wiki has pages on how I configure operating systems, servers, games, and other general notes. I have notes on how I set-up Fedora Workstation, fun stuff like Diablo II Resurrected on Wine Staging with DLSS, and notes on how I built custom LineageOS images that I provided for a bit on xda-developers. There's a good variety of things 🙂 For my game notes, I like to stick with separate Wine prefixes and Wine Staging, and none of that obfuscating Lutris or Proton stuff most people use :p

I like using DokuWiki for my notes, and hope they'll help others who happen to find them!

https://wiki.realmofespionage.xyz/start

Global DokuWiki Links