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New Server

As a reward to myself for 6 months of regular posts - no mean feat given my previous history of blogging - I have allowed myself to splurge and purchase parts for a new ‘server’. In this case I didn’t use proper server components like my NAS re-re build, deciding that for the bang-for-buck I wanted wouldn’t be found trying to source Intel Xeon processors. I also wanted to avoid the sort of over-sized rackmount or workstation monolith that comes with powerful SME machinations and go for something meatier than the small business builds you find in things like the HP N40L MicroServer (one of which I already have from years ago).

In the end I settled for the following build:

It uses a bunch of off-the-shelf parts that I could assemble myself in a small form factor that is relatively quiet and powerful enough for my needs.

The server has been configured with OpenNebula, a lightweight and simple to configure open source virtualisation platform (it uses KVM under the hood). So far I’ve configured it with a Taiga instance to work on project management, a GitLab server for version control and soon CI/CD, and a HAProxy VM to handle routing TLS connections to all the web servers on my network.

I’ve named this box Snowy after my plush toy panther and it joins:

What’s next?

I think I want to start running some more applications on Snowy and Leggy, starting with:

  • Tiny Tiny RSS, a lightweight RSS server on Leggy
  • A Runner on Snowy to automatically test and deploy projects from GitLab
  • Maybe move my Minecraft server to reduce my hosting costs
  • A VM to handle all, my, Twitter bots on Snowy
  • Something to centralise all the logs generated from every project/server
  • Various VMs to hold other projects of mine

I’m also considering breathing new life into some of my other, older hardware and maybe eventually acquiring a Raspberry Pi 4.