Running servers at home like an absolute lunatic
I’ve recently been having a problem with my mailserver. I could receive mail fine, but trying to send would frequently time out, whether it was me sending email manually from my mail client or services on the same box as postfix. The fact that the problem was limited to SMTP led me to suspect that…
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that I’m quite keen on the idea of getting Big Tech out of my life as much as possible. If you haven’t, well done – we’re only in the first paragraph and you’ve already caught up. I’ll be honest: when I say I want…
There are two kinds of people: those who have lost data, and those who will. I’m one of those who have lost data, so I’m going to take a moment to tell you how I go about avoiding that. What’s brought this on, you might ask? Blame Mike. We were just talking about data loss…
In Part 1 of this guide we went over the basic installation process for your first Linux home server. In Part 2 we covered a brief introduction to the Linux terminal and some useful commands for navigating around. Here in Part 3 we’re going to focus on setting up containerised services using Docker and Portainer.…
In Part 1 of this guide we went over the basic installation process for your first Linux home server. Welcome to Part 2, where we’ll be covering how to connect to your new server, some filesystem basics and how to navigate around the terminal. Picking up where we left off, you should now be able…
Inspired by a conversation on Mastodon, I thought it might be fun to try to write up the process of turning a spare PC into your own home server, assuming absolutely zero prior knowledge of administering Linux servers. Part 1 will cover installing the OS, Part 2 will cover basic terminal familiarity and Part 3…
Last weekend I went to install some extra RAM to hopefully carry me through until I’m able to upgrade it completely, only to find that one of the CPU sockets had stopped working. Continue reading…
It’s been a while since I’ve written about the status of my homelab, and a lot has changed. Obviously I couldn’t leave the big Supermicro box sitting on a table, that’s just untidy. I picked up an 18u closed rack cabinet from Prism. It’s only 800mm deep in order to fit in the space next…
At least, I can’t. Between backing up the various machines around the house and the VPS this site sits on, my repositories of past projects and a fairly hefty collection of ripped media (if you have any early DVDs they’re getting toward the end of their lifespan) I was rapidly outgrowing the repurposed desktop that…