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Creative Destruction – The Home Server

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*Creative Destruction: The Home Server is dead! Long Live the Home Server!*I recently had bad sectors on two disks of a RAID5 array on my home server. With a lot of hacking of “mdadm” (Linux’s RAID management utility) I did manage to recover the data, but I decided to use the opportunity for some creative destruction.

My home server started life as a “dedicated PC” to run MythTV, with dual PVR250’s connected to astro and hypptv to record programs. I then added three NICs to use it a proof of concept for my UniFi Linux Router script. Over time it started hosting a wiki, git server, and hosting a few web applications for myself and work. I’ve unsubscribed from Astro TV, so the PVR features are gone. It’s now an old clunky PC.

My Desktop PC … is where I sit and is a bit of a monster PC (6-core, 32GB RAM, dual 24″ displays, blah-blah). Since I’m a lazy bum I leave it on 24/7, and since it is a monster PC I’ve started hosting some virtualhosts on it for testing and also work stuff.

While recovering the data, I started wondering why I need to have TWO PCs on 24/7, especially since my desktop PC can easily handle all the extra services.

So … I bought another router (a TP-Link WR-1043ND-V2) and flashed OpenWRT on it, and got it running with UniFi. This model is quite similar to the old WR-1043ND, except that it’s faster and has more storage. But OpenWRT sees all the ports numbered in reversed. So if anyone’s confused with the VLAN numbering, I’ve put up a guide here: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s389/sh/eccb5127-7a14-46e9-8857-20ebfdf99c10/84d25984ed139c4154ee1939091a1f4e. I also got my OpenVPN server running on it, which was quite straightforward (it runs Linux after all, so i just had to copy the server config and certs/keys from the home server). It’s also running apache to do virtualhosting and redirecting and reverse-proxying. I love this little box.

Meanwhile I moved the RAID hard disks over to my Desktop PC (which now has a total of 7TB of storage!!), and fired up a few more Virtual Machines, segregating work stuff and personal stuff.

Three casualties:

1) My LinuxRouter script … I think only a couple of people are using it out there (the only purpose would be “syok sendiri”). Well since I no longer run it, I can’t really work on it any more. The code is still at http://home.abubakar.net/gitpub/?p=unifi_pppoe;a=summary if anyone needs it.

2) My WiKi … while backing it up I discovered there were a lot of “link bait” web pages, due to some misconfigured security settings. Honestly, I think I am getting too old to manage this stuff. So decided to make use of the Samsung 1-year free premium offer and migrate everything into an Evernote Public Notebook, which can be accessed at the old URL here: http://home.abubakar.net/IckyWiki.

3) Since I no longer have a downstairs PC, I can’t watch videos and youtube on my TV any more, so the TV is now a dedicated Roku/Netflix screen. Hopefully, I can find a cheap media client, or maybe finally have a use for the Raspberry P I bought.

LINK:

Evernote shared notebook:

Comments (1):

  • 2014-10-07 11:29:23+0800 Zulfadli Sukarno Raspberry pi is no good for media client. You might want to consider lenovo small pc (idea centre bla bla bla) or intel nuc which is cost a bit but with better spec.

This post was originally published publicly on Google+ at 2014-10-07 01:41:56+0800

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