Moving to a new home!

This blog has been hosted on a cheap, low end VM for years. 1vCPU with a gig of RAM. WordPress is kinda a pig, and it would sometimes run out of RAM and crash. The price of the VM has been creeping up and I finally shopped around to find a new host, which is who is serving this. I now have 2vCPUs ans 4 gigs of RAM. Data bandwidth feels way faster, however, I’ll admit to never actually measuring it.

First, we need to setup the VM. Debian 13 just came out and it’s not available yet from my VM vendor, so let’s start with Debian 12 and upgrade.

adduser foo
sudo visudo
apt-update, apt-upgrade
sudo sed -i 's/bookworm/trixie/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-update, apt-upgrade (again)
apt full-upgrade
sudo shutdown -r now
sudo apt modernize-sources
sudo apt --purge autoremove
sudo apt autoclean

Now we need to put a WordPress environment together.
sudo apt install mariadb-server apache2 php fastfetch screen htop unzip php-mysql php-curl php-imagick php-zip php-mbstring php-intl php-dom php-redis redis-server certbot python3-certbot-apache
sudo systemctl enable apache2 && sudo systemctl start apache2
sudo systemctl start mariadb && sudo systemctl enable mariadb
sudo mariadb-secure-installation
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Setup database
mariadb -u root -p
CREATE USER foo@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'hackme';
CREATE DATABASE foobar;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON foobar.* TO foo@localhost;
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

WordPress stuff
wget https://wordpress.org/latest.zip
unzip latest.zip
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data wordpress

Add the following to your wp-config.php, not really sure if you need this.
define( ‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘512M’ );
set_time_limit(900);

enable mod rewrite

Migration, tar /etc/apache2 and scp it to new host. Move config files over and enable sites
sudo a2ensite
systemctl reload apache2

Get HTTPS certs
certbot –apache

W6/ND-270 – Shadow Mountains (HP)

This wasn’t a planned summit for me. While driving north on US 395 to camp and hike other various summits, I noticed some hills in the distance. I pulled over and checked the SOTA maps and found I was looking at W6/SD-463 and W6/ND-270. They didn’t seem to be too far off the highway and the day was still early and cool. I made the detour and headed down Shadow Mountain Road – A slow dirt washboard road. Navigation was easy, and W6/ND-270 seemed the easiest of the two summits, so I headed to the base of the mountain. There are two hills – One I believe is an FAA radar site, and the other is the Shadow Mountains. I parked at a clearing at the bottom and hiked up. At the top was an empty radio shelter with some pretty decent artwork. I heard some radio chatter on 2M simplex and made a QSO there before setting up on 20M CW. There was little breeze and the sun was intense. After working chasers I packed up and headed back to the truck, then continued my way north on US 395.

https://sotl.as/summits/W6/ND-270

Date:02/05/2025 |  Summit:W6/ND-270 (Shadow Mountains (HP))

TimeCallsignBandModeNotes
22:10KC6ARY144MHzFMS57 R55
22:32K6STR14MHzCWS2S W6/SD-496 S53N R55N
22:33WU7H14MHzCWS55N R52N
22:34W6LOR14MHzCWS2S W6/SD-496 S599 R55N
22:35WW7D14MHzCWS51N R41N
22:36ND0C14MHzCWS42N R53N
22:37N4GO14MHzCWS42N R33N
22:46K6DV144MHzFMS59 R58