Jim's Projects: Community Server

[Jim Rockford]

• Installed nfs server and configured share for cloud storage
  
• Finished installing nextcloud VM. Ran into several issues with the "all in one" web installer and I ended up doing most of the setup manually (making the database/user, setting permissions, writing the .htaccess file, writing the config.php file, etc). I think they REALLY want you to use the docker containers.
  

This completes most of the big bullets that I had planned. All that is left is to work on the VMs and get [USER=28507]@Digital Prophet[/USER]'s storage up. I'm really missing my music and podcast servers though, so they are going to have to go back up sooner than later.

[Digital Prophet]

It would be nice to also have a neckbeard OS analog of dropbox maybe. I don't know what neckbeard OS has available for that.

[Jim Rockford]

Well, it's not a true analog, but Nextcloud is pretty much it. You do have to run a client to sync to local folders, but once that is set up you are good.

EDIT: That isn't entirely true actually. Nextcloud is at its heart a cloud service, so the files have to live on a server. So it does mean that in the case of running your own server, you will always have +1 copies of whatever those files are (one on each client that you use like normal folders, and one in the server that is "locked" away because of sophisticated file versioning and all the things that cloud file servers do).

The closest thing you have to dropbox is probably SyncThing. I've used it a lot to sync files with my phone. I don't know how dropbox works these days, but you put SyncThing on each client and connect them together over the local network. It can work over the internet, but your will need to set up a VPN tunnel for that purpose.

[Digital Prophet]

Dropbox saves things on the cloud, and then syncs local copies with whatever it has in the cloud whenever that changes. So if I save a new version of a file within my dropbox folder, it will upload that to the cloud and then distribute the new file to the local dropbox folder of each client attached to the account.


Its actually great and I have 2TB of storage on their cloud for free because they ran a bunch of promotions when it first started and I took advantage of all of them to get permanent free space upgrades. But I don't like that I don't directly control the cloud portion of it. It makes me paranoid.

Whenever i visit the dropbox website where I can make changes to what I have stored on their servers directly, it asks me if I want to upgrade my free account with 2TB of space to a paid subscription account with 2TB of space.

[Jim Rockford]

Well, I stand corrected again. This is pretty much exactly how nextcloud works. I do like centralized storage better than distributed - mostly because there is one "source of truth" as far as the "original" document goes. The service handles all the issues that come from that like file versioning and handling merge conflicts.

But I also understand not having direct control of that.

There is a silver lining to that, as long as whoever owns dropbox doesn't go evil, you do have free off-site backup of 2TB which in this day and age is nothing to sneer at. At least its not google drive or whatever micro$oft's cloud storage thing is. I need to think about that eventually. Once everything is running on the server, I will have my requisite 3 backups, but it would be really nice to have one of those backups not be here. The best I can do for now is have a backup on a removable drive I can grab in case of emergency, but off-site is safer.

We'll cross that bridge eventually...

[Jim Rockford]

This weekend we're seeing things nearing completion.

• Installed, mounted, and shared [USER=28507]@Digital Prophet[/USER]'s drives
  
• Finished last of cable management in case
  
• Uploaded all files to nextcloud instance, finished setting up nexcloud service
  
• Created audio service VM, mapped drives
  

Just a few things left

• Finish setting up navidrome and audiobookshelf
  
• write scripts to start/stop VMs
  
• move server into closet
  
• clean up closet
  

[Jim Rockford]

Updated the VM section in the OP as I changed my mind about some things based on some benchmarking tests and the actual compute we have available. Almost done!

[Jim Rockford]

Spent some time this evening finishing up the VM hosts and finally moved the server to the closet. I still need to finish setting up the audio server but I kind of needed a break from configuring websites, my head was beginning to spin a bit.

So close!!!!

[Digital Prophet]

My storage went from something like 12tb -> 40tb.

I was only using about 7ish tb I think, but it's nice to not have to worry about it as much.

[Digital Prophet]

this just makes me laugh every time i see it.