“Your post text starts here.”

The immortal words that echo a new platform. I’m starting this blog, likely temporarily and mostly because I wanted to explore alternative options in the blogging and CMS sphere; straying from Tumblr and even flirting with PHP in this case.

What brought me to Dropplets? Mania-induced lack of sleep and the fine tutorials (project ideas) and great prices (deal cement) of Digital Ocean (my referrer link). It’s put me into a frenzy of desire to rebuild my home infrastructure setup and update my online servers too. Hopefully this will be an exercise in gaining skills, particlar in the area of development operations, server administration and backup maintenance/implementation.

Currently I have a home-built FreeNAS box with 8TB RAIDZ2 share and a HP N40L microserver running Debian for development and testing. I also have a $20/month Digital Ocean Ubuntu MEAN instance that runs some small Node.JS applications and hosts some sites for me externally.

I plan to repurpose the FreeNAS box as an Ubuntu server that will host a GitLab instance, host backups, store files and share them via SMB/SAMBA with the Windows computers at home and potentially act as a DLNA server. I will temporarily retire the N40L and bring back into service an AMD Fusion E-350 platform with 60GB SSD as an Ubuntu server that will act as a primary DNS server for the household (hopefully allowing me to route better internally with hostnames/domains) and development/testing environment that should hopefuly be quite similar to my remote server.

I’ll be using another $20 instance (and eventually retiring the current one) from Digital Ocean with a pure Ubuntu 14.04 image as a production server for my website and applications (considering using Dokku containers for those) with routing handled by nginx. I’m also considering using it as a mail server and backing my home GitLab (and other very important documents) to this VPS.

Will this all work out? We’ll see.