A quick rundown on the state of the home-servers I run or applications I host on the cloud.

Last week I opened up my Nextcloud instance for external access. Now, since my brother’s RPi4 was already exposed on the same network, I had to setup a reverse proxy on another RPi3 to access both simultaneously behind the router. Here’s the current setup:

Proxy server: An RPi3 running on Raspbian Buster Lite with HAProxy installed to handle the reverse proxy. Here’s the gist of the code that’s handling all the heavy lifting. Since SSL is handled by the other servers themselves, all I needed was a quick pass-through handshake from HAProxy.

Server 01: An RPi3 running on NextcloudPi essentially serving Nextcloud for all my file needs. Data is simultaneously backed up on a couple machines within the network. Decided against a remote backup [S3/Backblaze] for now.

Server 02: An RPi4 running on Diet-Pi and serving Pi-Hole and a Nextcloud instance. I’ve turned off DHCP on the Orbi router and delegated that to the Pi-Hole. Both the Pi-Hole and the router have static IPs assigned to the SBCs and my trusty Dell machine based on their MAC address. I’m debating if I should move the Pi-Hole over to the Proxy Server…

Beyond the home-lab, I have a droplet with DigitalOcean serving this website and a few other portals I manage. ServerPilot runs in the background on that droplet taking care of all the critical needs. I do intend to shift this over to a home-lab once I get hold of my ODroid XU4 which is currently in the Uganda shipment several thousand miles away in Chennai!

Early this year, I also procured a Hetzner cloud instance to test its stability and see if I could move over certain portals to it. Should say I’m pretty impressed! Running on Debian Stretch and powered by Yunohost, I installed PixelFed and Wallabag. Installation has never been any easier! One drawback for sure is that the code-base may be a bit lagged as it gets deployed on Yunohost. Nevertheless, it’s pure magic to see things getting installed with just a few clicks and not much back-end work.

And then, I manage a Moodle Bitnami instance running on an AWS instance. I intend to move it over to the Hetzner cloud over the next month or so.