I was never aware of the homage aspect lmao
I don't remember exactly given its been over a decade since this has been happening, but I think it was somehow related to a faulty logrotate configuration that caused apache2 to explode. Pretty sure I just ended up writing a script that would check if apache2 was running and relaunch it if not until I switched to NGINX.
probably not, im a pretty shitty local dev, trying to do web dev when i can't do local very well seems like a recipe for extreme failure.
causing problems on purpose
The servers I run for a living primarily deal with processing weather data, the rest just serve to assist in me and my friends' creative ventures. Communal mass file hosting, shared web hosting, whatever else. It saves my homies lots of money and compared to everything else in our data center it costs basically nothing. It's crazy how much some companies charge for large scale cloud storage after seeing just how cheap it actually is to provide, granted that's probably just because of my friends' specific use case.
Hosting providers
I've used nuclearfallout/NFO for years, they're mainly for game hosting but I use their VPSes for lots of different things cuz you get a lot of storage for pretty cheap. It's not quite as cost effective these days but I'm grandfathered in with one of their old plans. I appreciate them on the basis of not being a huge company and having accessible, human support when you need it. Most of my sites I host myself nowadays (technically colo-ing through work, but if I run the data center I guess that's still self-hosting :P) but I have a couple of their VPSes for things I don't feel like hosting myself for security or legality reasons, e.g. games, pirated media, whatever else.
Domain providers
Namecheap but a lot of people seem to suggest Epik instead. I really don't care, prices are about the same across all of them, it's more a matter of how intuitive their UI/UX is personally.
Self-hosting with old computers
E-waste is awesome!!! (yes)
Pictured above:
- An R710 running XCP-ng to host a bunch of VMs
- An R720 running Seafile, sort of like a personal OneDrive/Dropbox my friends use for their VFX work
- A stripped down 1950 maintaining automated backups of everything above
Home media server
I ran a Jellyfin server off of an old NOAAPort receiver I gutted and filled with my own parts for a little bit. Then the motherboard died and I was too lazy to fix it, but I wanna set up something similar in the future, probably with more efficient hardware.
Hosting nightmares
Lots of nightmares but none of them are particularly interesting. Mostly hardware failures that wouldn't have been an issue with better redundancy and less ancient equipment. Probably the most annoying thing I've encountered is when the satellite dish we use for ingesting NOAAPort data at work suddenly started giving us garbage, which perplexed us for weeks, only for us to find out it was 5G interference. We installed a C-band bandpass filter LNB to mitigate the 5G shit and everything worked again. So maybe 5G isn't turning the frogs gay but it's breaking lots of shit people rely on, and that's almost just as bad.
Somehow being reminded of this thread, and since it has been a while I'd like to revive it! As the last reply was "2 years ago" I can imagine a lot of things might have changed for people (or not). They sure have for me. You can also treat this thread as a "show off your stuff" thread I guess (I don't think it differs enough to start a new thread for this).
Things that haven't changed
- I'm still using Namecheap for my domains (fuck radix registry, btw)
- tthew.space still runs on a DO container
- I'm still not a real programmer
Things that Have changed
Things that Have changed are mostly related off-loading my stuff from conventional "cloud" providers cough cough DigitalOcean to a home-server plus trying out things for fun while not necessarily having a need for them.
Home server "adventures"
After upgrading my old i7-6700k to a Ryzen 9700x, I had a bunch of parts sitting around in a case with nothing for it to do and collecting dust in the attic. After so many years of faultless service, it felt kind of rude. So, I repurposed it as a NAS + Nextcloud host. I decided on using SAS drives as they are dirt cheap on the used market and got a decent deal for 4 2TB refurbished Seagate Exos 7E8 drives.
With my motherboard being a consumer Z170 board, and SAS working a little different to SATA, I needed an HBA (Host Bus Adapter) expansion card that can power SAS drives. I ended up getting an LSI 9207-8i on Nook's recommendation (thank you!) off AliExpress. Problem is, these cards are made for "blade" like servers with high pressure airflow, so they can get Quite toasty. I was told (again also by Nook)to mount a fan to the heatsink to cool the card.
So I did ...
The server has officially been dubbed the "TaxAirfryer" and hasn't caught fire yet in almost a week's time!
It's running proxmox with TrueNAS in a VM with the HBA card passed to it directly, and therefore all the Seagate drives. The drives are in a Raid-Z2 config and passed to Nextcloud through an NFS mount.
For remote access I have a VPS running Caddy as a reverse proxy through a wireguard tunnel to the Nextcloud VM.
The new Taxcollector2.0: electric boogaloo
I also bought a Lenovo m900 Tiny. I use this run other services, one of which is my HomeAssistant environment that has a whopping 6 lights attached to it AND a remote to control said lights. This tiny box also runs my Very Own monitoring system, https://moni.tthew.space/. specifically it runs the agent that polls various services and pushes them to the same VPS I use for the reverse proxy. Which is also running a Flask server that exposes the status page.
I probably forgot a bunch for this "update" but I'm curious to see what other people are running nowadays. I haven't decided yet on a back-up strategy so what are you doing on this front.
ooh fun bump, my server situations have indeed changed in the past 2 years!! (not that i posted in this thread to begin with lole)
Domains
I've used Namecheap for my domains since ~2014. They were I believe the first major provider to offer free WHOISGuard, though most have followed suit since. In my experience it just works. Really though the provider tends not to matter; you are at the whim of domain registries themselves - Radix (manages .site, .host, .space, etc) recently announced price hikes upwards of 6000% on their TLDs, making my domain wart.host a whopping $130 USD to renew in December, so obviously I'll be dropkicking that lol.
The ""cloud""
The LowEndBox community recently held holiday flash sales so I've ended up with two new VPSes to kick the year off! I definitely rate LEB - the providers are reputable, and if you time things right you can end up with some pretty insane deals. The first VPS I got through them has been running since 2018 with no hiccups, though sadly it has been superceded in both power and value and so I will be putting it to rest at the end of the month...
VPS #1 has 4 (Skylake) vcores, 8GB RAM, 100GB NVMe storage, and a shared 10Gbit link and is costing me just £17 a year. It is honestly far more power than I need but I couldn't pass up a deal like that. The only caveat personally is that SMTP ports are blocked, but that's fine, because enter...
VPS #2, a humble 1c/1GB/25GB box but which costs me a mere half a stone a year. I've been hosting both my website and my personal mailserver on one similarly-specced VPS since 2020 and while it has done the job, I never really liked having the single point of failure, plus I feel mailservers are best self-contained anyway. I seriously lucked out in this instance as I ended up rolling a perfectly clean IP and won't have to go through the rituals of explaining myself to the various DNSBLs out there again! I've ended up configuring the services manually (with a lot of help from this guide, which helped me to understand the entirely changed syntax of Dovecot 2.4's configuration - like really? on a minor version??) as I found the blackbox approach of automatic deploys such as Mailinabox tricky to diagnose when they didn't work straight away for me.
Both are running Debian as it's what I'm most familar with. Maybe with a fresh start I'll be a more responsible sysadmin and keep software up to date? Not likely...
Home server
This past summer I got a bee in my bonnet and decided to build a home server, primarily to serve as a NAS. If memory serves right, I had initially planned just to get more storage and then found refurbished SAS hard drives going for practically free on eBay. Upon expressing concern in chat about fitting it all in my main PC gebruikersnaam was like "just put it in a separate box lol" and that was that! With the power of eBay, AliExpress, and some thrifting, I was able to put the whole system together from scratch, with 9TB of storage, for just shy of £100.
The key ingredients were the aforementioned SAS drives from eBay. At the time, I was able to pick up three 3TB HGST drives for about £10 each. To get them actually hooked up to the system, I purchased an LSi 9211-8i HBA from AliExpress for just shy of £20, along with the appropriate SFF-8087 to SFF-8482 cables at negligible cost, and a basic 40mm fan to cable-tie to the heatsink as I was informed (and confirmed once receiving it) they run HOT. I found an old Corsair case with suitable 3.5" bays again on eBay for about 15. I had no spare PSU, so, at great risk-I highly advise against this-I ended up purchasing an untested one for peanuts. It worked in my case though, and despite being listed as an F-tier fire hazard on that one cultists list, it's survived under my bed for about 6 months now! As for the guts themselves, I did purchase this Xeon + mobo + 32GB RAM kit from Ali for about £40 with the intent of using it in my server, but due to incidents involving very expensive laptops dying, I ended up stealing it for use in my daily driver. Instead, I opted to use a bundle of an i3-7100, 8GB RAM, and some epic gamer MSI mobo, which I was given free from the thrift shop I used to work at (keep in touch with your former employers, you never know what perks you may get!!)
Oh yeah, pictured above underneath the tower is the little wheeled stand I got from Ali for just £0.01 due to some kind of pricing error! I was amazed they still followed through. I wouldn't have even complained if they didn't!
So essentially I've built a basic office PC which happens to have server grade hard drives in it lol. If you've already got the guts spare or are able to source them cheap, it's a really cost effective way to get a lot of storage going. Unlike Matthew I've not actually done anything fancy with it yet - it's running plain Win10 LTSC with the drives bare and unRAIDed, just mapped as network drives lol. It's proven a great place to store all my media and shit though. At some stage I may open it to the global internet and have my own sort of Abyss, but no hard plans to do so.
