System Administration

Many of the courses I have taken have neglected the topic of system administration, so it has been a personal interest and hobby of mine. Over the years, I have developed a small home lab, a small server system designed for home use, which I use for tinkering, learning, and hosting a handful of services.

Server History

Around the time that I started getting interested in software development, I also started getting interested in servers and what they could do. From this, I started looking into what I wanted to do with the limited hardware at my disposal, an old Compaq computer. After putting a hard drive in it and getting a flash drive with FreeNAS, I started my system administration journey.

After getting started with a network-attached storage (NAS) system, I started learning virtual machines, and eventually got better hardware. I soon started working with Proxmox which hosted a NAS and acted as a hypervisor. At the time, I lacked knowledge of containers, so most of my dealings were with virtual machines. I now have a better grasp of containers, and I have started migrating most of my services away from their virtual machine based solutions.

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Server Setup

At the moment, I have two computers running Proxmox in a cluster, five Raspberry Pi computers running Docker Swarm, and a desktop running a pfSense firewall. These devices are connected by a 24-port switch, and wifi is provided by a router that has been repurposed into an access point. Due to computers being fairly expensive, most of these parts are used or older.

When it comes to the software that these machines run, I have Proxmox as my preferred hypervisor, Debian as my preferred operating system (OS), Docker Swarm for the firewall, and Docker for containers. Ubuntu was more convenient for the Raspberry Pi computers, so they run Ubuntu as their OS.

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Technologies

The virtualization technologies that I use in my homelab include Proxmox, Docker, and Docker Swarm. Proxmox is installed on my servers to host any virtual machines that I need, while Docker is hosted in a virtual machine to provide any containers that I need. The Raspberry Pi computers are running Docker Swarm to allow me to learn more about container orchestration.

My preferred operating system is Debian, and most virtual machines that I run are installed with Debian as the OS. I have worked with other operating systems as well, including Arch and Fedora, but these are more for particular use cases rather than general usage. For my firewall, Docker Swarm is the OS, and for the servers themselves, the OS is Proxmox. The Raspberry Pi computers run Ubuntu, but this is a derivative of Debian.

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