Home Lab - Part I: Server
In the last few months I expanded my home lab with a new server (and a new router but that’ll be in another post). I purchased a used enterprise server and started migrating my already hosted services over to it (for example this website) and adding services and experimenting with things to learn and grow and have fun.
Solid State Drive
One of the best bang for your buck upgrades you can make for your computer is a solid state drive (SSD). Of course it depends on what your computer already has, and how you use it, but for me - when I often restart because I dual boot windows and linux and I was still working off an old platter disk, it made absolute sense. So this post is about my new SSD and how it compares to my old drives.
FOG Project
The Fog project is an image server I setup to help out when deploying new (well in my case old computers). I started volunteering to refurbish donated old computers for people who otherwise can’t afford one. The steps of refurbing each computer include installing windows 10 and a few programs, which while not all that difficult can be time consuming. An image server can really cut down on install time.
Cloudflare
I have added Cloudflare as a CDN for this website and cleaned up a bit of extra files behind the scenes - again another tech heavy post with details you can ignore but should make the website load faster.
Migrated to Jekyll
Some website updates: I have switched from using wordpress to using Jekyll. This will be full of tech details so you can ignore it if that doesn’t interest you. Long story short: the web pages should load faster and the images should scale better.
Using an Old Smartphone as a Dashcam
I had an old samsung galaxy s4 sitting around and I’ve always wanted to re-purpose it for something and an upcoming road trip has my mind on driving and I realized it might make a decent dashcam.
Acer Aspire E5-575G-53VG Laptop
Time for a laptop! I’ve always avoided them because a desktop is so much more powerful and upgradeable for the same price, and a smart phone filled my need for mobility. But something has to be said for the combination of power and mobility a laptop offers, and while a phone can be a fine substitute for some things, sometimes you need a bit more. So now I have a laptop.
Raspberry Pi Home Server - Part 2 - OpenVPN and more
In my first raspberry pi post I described how I set up the raspberry pi to block ads using Pi-hole. But there were some other things I was running:
–[OpenVPN server
Raspberry Pi Home Server - Part 1 - What is it and what can it do?
What is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi)? it’s a small (think credit card size), cheap computer with some interesting options for tinkering and learning. You can do many things with it, like set up a https://retropie.org.uk/) to play old arcade or console games, set up a https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/magic-mirror/) or https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry+pi+projects). It really is pretty neat.