Posts in Year 2026

SETUP SELF-HOSTED GIT SERVER ON LINUX

With the enshittification of Github and potentially, Bitbucket with AI tools and changes in terms of services where the owners of those platforms could decide to start training their AI models on proprietary code, I decided that it was time to host my own git server at home.

This post is to set it up on a Debian system. This is not using any of the web-UI front-ends like gitea or gogs or gerrit. This post describes setting up the bare-bones git server and migrating the old repositories to this git server.

A web-UI like those mentioned above are not necessary to use git. They can be useful for code-review if your team is larger, but for one-person teams like mine, I do not need a web UI unnecessarily running. Setting it up on a Debian or Ubuntu system is very easy and this post will show you how.

This post will also show how to use ssh based authentication and is not for http based authentication. ssh based authentication is more secure.

SETTING UP INBOUND AND OUTBOUND CALLING ON PHONE SYSTEM WITH ASTERISK

Previously we saw how to setup and internal phone system using Asterisk and old Cisco® phones with extensions. You could call any phone extension in the system directly. However, it did not do any outbound calling to actual phones or receive inbound calls from them.

This post explains how to use a VOIP provider like Twilio or Vonage or VOIP.ms using the concept of SIP Trunking.

By setting up the Asterisk system to use SIP trunking, the phone system can now make outbound calls and receive inbound calls from regular phones. Back in the day, the USA had analog telephones, commonly known as POTS or PSTN, but in the last ten years or so these telephones have completely disappeared and replaced with VOIP phones. Historically, you would have needed a custom PCI-E card to convert your VOIP to POTS technology, but today you do not need that anymore. You can use a VOIP service provider like Twilio or Vonage or VOIP.ms and be successful at doing calls to regular phones. All over the internet using your existing internet connection without paying too much extra.

SETTING UP AN INTERNAL PHONE SYSTEM WITH OLD CISCO® IP PHONES AND ASTERISK

In 2020, I wrote a post on updating firmware on old Cisco® IP phones, and I got carried away by other projects and this project went on the backburner. This year I decided to complete this project, so that I could use these wired VOIP phones as an internal phone system across multiple rooms, where I could dial a number and speak to a person in a different room. I use this to interact with my family members when I want to ask them something and do not want to walk over for whatever reason.

Asterisk is an open source PBX - Private Branch Exchange software that I used to set this up. The process is a bit involved and is tricky to get right if you miss something in the configuration.

I will describe the process in detail in this post. Note that this post does not describe a setup for making outbound calls or receiving inbound calls on actual landline phone numbers. This is for creating a custom extension per phone, and calling those extensions, similar to what you find in hotels, where you can call one room to another by dialing that room’s number.