Regular readers of my site no doubt noticed that my site was offline for a little while a few days ago (today, by the timestamp, because Bolt doesn't let me postdate articles, only postdate when they go live) because I was upgrading the software to the latest stable version.  It went remarkably smoothly this time, modulo the fact that I had to manually erase the disk cache so the upgrade process could finish and not error out.  Deleting the cache alone took nearly an hour, and in the process I discovered something I wish I'd known about when I first …

EDIT - 20171011 - Added a bit about getting real login shells inside of this Screen session, which fixes a remarkable number of bugs.  Also cleaned up formatting a bit.

To keep the complexity of parts of my exocortex down I've opted to not separate everything into larger chunks using popular technologies these days, such as Linux containers (though I did Dockerize the XMPP bridge as an experiment) because there are already quite a few moving parts, and increasing complexity does not make for a more secure or stable system.  However, this brings up a valid and important question, which is "How …