Herein you shalt find the hardware that currently (+/- time) acts as the base for the various parts of my life that require servers not provided by places of work and/or education.
A new year has landed and already it’s first month has left those remaining with the cheque. In keeping with my capricious nature, I am often struck with the need to re-do my setup of local and remote servers/hosting. One of those times is now upon me and I’ll likely use this post to document the happenings.
Remote Setup My existing remote setup consisted of a $20/month DigitalOcean instance (snowy-old) running most services, a $10/month instance for a friend’s static site and another $10/month instance designated for use by two projects on which I volunteer.
I got to spend some time this weekend setting up a mailserver for my personal domain (adamogrady.id.au) and thought I’d jot down some points on this blog. In particular my mail setup uses a Postfix MTA that forward emails from all addresses to a single user, stores messages in the Maildir format and forwards a copy of everything to my Gmail account (which I use for the web interface and which has been my primary address for some time).
As part of a re-hash of my home servers and development environment, I’m focusing on containerised app/software installation in server environment. In particularly I’ll be focusing on Vagrant for the setup and configuration of quick dev environments and Docker for running software securely in it’s own containers.
Below you should find a short list of the steps required to set up a server with Docker, install Gitlab, PostgreSQL for storage, Redis for caching, and nginx as a reverse proxy to serve requests to your Gitlab instance.
I’m sorry Ops blog, I know I’ve been neglecting you lately. It’s just I haven’t had many projects recently that would fit in with this blog or be worthwhile making a post about. However that’s changed a bit since the past weekend.
Although I’ve been preparing for and busy with a new job, I found some time to develop a small journal-keeping project that I’ve aptly named re:mind Journal that’s properly available online in all it’s glory.
Okay, so Kindle For Mac is an okay program and I wanted to explore it’s reader capabilities a bit more since Calibre’s built in reader is a bit lacking in aesthetic (important when reading for long tracts) and slow to respond to user input. However I discovered something very annoying when first loading up Kindle; it only imports the books that you have purchased from Amazon, not the Send-To-Kindle documents that are also on Amazon Cloud Drive.
It’s good to be back and blogging again about potential issues or tutorials when operating or deploying equipment. In this instance, Ubuntu 14.04 with Samba fails to load nmbd on startup (at least especially when using a statically assigned IP), preventing it from starting a NetBIOS Name Server advertising it’s hostname on the local network. There is a pretty easy solution/workaround for this however, so we’ll be brief.
You need to open up /etc/init/nmbd.
A problem I’ve been having recently with a couple of Ubuntu 14.04 servers is receiving a “Waiting for network configuration” and “Waiting up to 60 seconds more for network” messages on boot, despite all network functions being available once it’s finished booting. I’ve so far tracked it down to an issue with the servers that have both static IP addresses set and Samba installed through Aptitude.
The fix I found for it is updating your /etc/network/interfaces file so that the static IP address assignment looks something like the following:
Sorry for the relatively long time without updating, I haven’t been working much on the Operations side, either confidential programming or relaxing (quite substantially too).
So I noticed my Samsung Galaxy S III had been becoming quite sluggish as of late and even a factory reset and reconfigure didn’t seem to fix things, so I decided to finally look at flashing another rom and went with CyanogenMod.
My choice was mainly based on popularity having heard it mentioned the most (in good terms) and with it’s positive reputation and light footprint I was easily swayed (I’m using past tense but am writing this up as I go along).
So the reason I needed to back up one of the SD Cards from my RaspberryPi earlier (and I wrote a tutorial about it) was I wanted to explore PirateBox, a free software implementation of a private network for users to anonymously connect, chat and share files.
I utilised the tiny, 802.11n USB adaptor that I got with my RaspberryPi and a 16GB thumb drive I had lying around to build it.