Success! It is alive! My reformatted file and GitLab server is alive and kicking! I’ve reformatted and partitioned the remaining 5x 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green drives and created a full-size ext4 partition on each one. They’re also set to automount on boot to folders in /mnt that are named based upon the drive’s purpose (miscellaneous, steamapps, backups, etc). I’ve also started a Samba daemon (and written a tutorial for it!
Alrighty then, it appears the file server component of my storage machine is finally up and running, has survived a reboot and had a test write&read from both Windows (via SMB/CIFS, you know, Samba) and Linux (via the host machine). So now I’m going to run through a quick tutorial in setting up Samba on Ubuntu 14.04 (I’ve used a headless Server edition but whatever floats your boat) so you too can work towards creating a networked file server.
I’ve always loved accessing things via SSH, it’s nifty, quick and way more secure than trying to telnet into a device. Something cool that I’ve setup recently though is SSH access sans password! It’s not incredibly difficult and the end result has some nifty benefits, particularly the ability to script SSH sessions with commands without you needing to be there to type a password. The first one that came to mind for me was cron and rsync combos for regular, secure, remote backups but it also allows you to do some neat stuff with PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) implementations like Heroku or in my case, Dokku.
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.
So how has everything been running so far? While distracted by sub-par pizza I’ve managed to get some work done in the past 48 hours.
Starting with developing ideas of how I want my systems to exist, I’ve reformatted the AMD E-350 + 60GB SSD server to Ubuntu server 14.04 x64 and loaded some basic tools (including Bind9 and nginx). I’ve also done a lot in terms of backing up the FreeNAS file server; a task upon itself.
“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).