State of The Networks - Feb 2021

A quick rundown on the state of the home-servers I run or applications I host on the cloud. Published while listening to: Malang

With our temporary relocation, I currently manage two ‘home-labs’ - one which I remotely manage with a WireGuard tunnel and the other just a local-access only setup. The remote home-lab is essentially a Nextcloud server running on a DietPi OS spun on an RPi4. I pulled down the HAProxy config on the fronting server since that was no longer required.

The local home-lab currently encompasses four units:

• NextcloudPi running on an RPi3 and connected to a 1TB main drive: This has been our primary document and media backup servers silently chugging along for close to three years now!
• OSMC installed on another RPi3: With a 1TB media drive, Amazon video and Youtube addons this primarily serves as a secondary family Television. A bit on the sluggish end but does the job for now.
• DietPi running on an Odroid-XU4: Pi-Hole for Ad control and WireGuard to access the remote home-lab.
• PoPOS running on an Intel NUC7: My primary workstation! An attached 1TB drive acts as the secondary backup for my NC setup and then I run sync jobs to a 256GB flash drive for a cold backup of the really important files.

And then, on a remote VM I run a slew of services that handle most of my social and productivity tools. Fronted by Traefik and running in docker containers, the following services run on the 8GB server:

• Bookstack – Wiki software which I am currently using to help publish my dad’s second book
• Known – I mostly use this as a quick bookmarking tool. I also post short updates or status notes here infrequently.
• Wallabag – Read-later app
• Pixelfed – Way better than Instagram and my go-to space to post individual images
• Minflux – The light-weight feed-reader that I pipe all my RSS subscriptions to
• Trilium Notes – A terrific Evernote alternative with awesome Markdown support
• Signal-CLI – I use this for server trigger notifications to be sent via SMS
• Etherpad – Quick, collaborative notes
• CryptPad - Collaboration suite for documents
• Calibre - I use this to manage my digital books collection
• Lychee - A nifty photo gallery where I currently save my digital stamps
• WordPress – I run 4 instances of WordPress – Portals for folks in my family
• Nextcloud – This one’s more to test the recent releases before I deploy them on my home-lab

Sometime down the lane I would like to setup a Snikket instance for family chats.