16. December 2016

Building a cheap and power-friendly home server. Part 3.

My home server has been running almost without issue for many months now. It has gone down a couple times because I also use the server to tinker with things and for other reasons I outline below. After reading this blog post about running Docker in production I started to rethink why I was using it over LXC. The main reason was because there were existing Docker images for a lot of the services I wanted to run on my server. Which meant a faster start up time and presumably less headaches. After thinking about it some more and realizing that I spent a lot of time fighting with Docker to get it working the way I wanted, I decided that Docker sucks. I hate it and it wastes a lot of my time.

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13. April 2016

Using hashbackup with Backblaze's B2 storage

I have been following Backblaze (referral link) since I started using them for backup way back when Mozy screwed their customers back in 2011. I was a happy user of Mozy until they moved to a new pricing model that heavily punished users storing lots of data. Intelligently, Backblaze saw the opportunity and pounced, capturing many previous Mozy users. Backblaze has been my favorite backup company since then. Their app is great and just works in the background, restores are easy, and their website is beautiful. They are very transparent about what they do and are the go-to guys for hard drive lifetime statistics. They pride themselves on keeping prices where they are no matter what happens. They are well known for keeping prices the same while increasing capacity through the hard drive shortage in 2011-2012 by “shucking” external drives for their innards.

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20. March 2016

Building a cheap and power-friendly home server. Part 2.

In part 2, I describe the set up and some annoying realizations that caused me to rethink many assumptions that I had.

I had originally invisioned one server to rule them all. With one server there is only one place to manage everything and one OS to update. I wanted to run every service as a Docker container with all configuration and data residing on the host OS. That gives me the flexibility of only having to back up the config and data directories and allowing for fast recreation of any one service or the entire server itself. This idea proved a little difficult, as I will explain later.

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15. February 2016

Owncloud with Docker and persistant data

Setting up Owncloud in a Docker container is not as simple a feat as other web services. Owncloud requires a lot to run and breaks the Docker’s whole “one process” model for containers. Luckily, people have already built Docker containers to house Owncloud, so I had a starting point when I wanted to set it up for my home server. My goal is to have a complete solution that allows me to spin up a new Docker container from the hub and not have to maintain my own image.

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