So there’s been a few days worth of space since my last update here and that time has been mercifully filled with catching up on sleep, watching TV and backing up my FreeNAS old file server (finally, it is complete!).

I’ve installed Ubuntu Server 14.04 x64 on to one of the drives and proceeded to install GitLab on top of that. It’s an open source collaborative software development suite that I’ve been interested in starting up to store the various projects that I don’t want to put on my GitHub account because I don’t consider them mature enough, or they’re private or I’m just being neurotic about it.

If I’m going down this route of self-hosting my own code repos, along with my dev stuff and important files (rather than using a third party like DropBox), I’ll have to consider backup strategies for implementation to protect my critical resources. Well, in reality I just want my code and my photos backed up in case there’s ever a fire or major machine fault. I’m thinking of looking into the rsync utility along with some cron magick to automate backups from my machines onto the file server and the most important files to be backed up to the remote server.

Oh, I also set up bind9 on the dev/test server at home so it could act as a DNS server for all equipment in the house. It fails back to my ISP’s (iiNet) DNS servers if it doesn’t have the record but it does mean I can set up zones for my “development” domain (dev.adamogrady.id.au) and access them inside the house the same way I would externally. With a bit of nginx proxy magic I’ve also made it so external users can check out my Gitlab server, along with the resources actually on the dev/test server which port 80 is forwarded to (Dropplets-Dev, Ghost-Dev).