Running/managing my own server

[Eric Oyen]

You can also use virtual environments like VMWARE. I did this for a long time here at home and had success with it. I had one bare metal machine with 32 GB of ram, 2 core CPU and half a terabyte of storage spread across 10 drives. That machine ran easily 8 VMWare instances with linux ubuntu being the host system. One hardware lan interface was left unconfigured in the host OS and then configured inside a VMWARE instance running OpenBSD. A virtual lan bridge was also configured connected to the other external lan (configured by the host OS). The virtual lan connected as the second interface to the OpenBSD instance and I used that for DNS, firewall and DHCP for the internal lan. Several other instances included linux for a web server, an NFS server for NAS operations, a remote windows XP instance that could be logged into by any of the workstations in the house, one instance that acted as the PXE server for thin client stuff and several other instances including one for remote compiling jobs. Frankly, if you don’t have a lot of hardware laying around, this is the best possible use of your hardware to run multiple tasks.

Hope this gives you an idea or two. :)

-Eric
From the Central Offices of the Technomage Guild, Infrastructure support division.


> On Jul 11, 2021, at 11:23 AM, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Thank you for all your insight and help getting my home server up and running!!
> 
> As you may or may not know I am a PHP developer.  Over the years I have had ample opportunity to work on LAMP servers.  I was exposed to a lot and I have a ton to learn.
> 
> I currently have a VPS in a data center and a full service PHP hosting server in my home office that runs Let's Encrypt/BIND/Postfix/Dovecot as well.  I got it to work and need to get back and figure out how it works.  I have more questions than answers.
> 
> This morning the thought popped into my mind that running my own production server might be possible.  I'm thinking I can ditch Plesk at some point and run on the bare metal (VPS).  I know I have a ton to learn.  The home server is great for learning.  I would never host a production website out of my home.
> 
> I bought 3 books - Bind/Postfix/Dovecot and have subscribed to those lists as well.
> 
> I'm thinking I may be able to learn enough in 6 months to manage a VPS w/o Plesk.  Then, maybe later I can run a hardware server.
> 
> I am talking about a virtual PHP host running Ubuntu LTS, LAMP, Let's Encrypt, BIND, Postfix, Dovecot, and possibly some webmail app.  Not sure of anything else I would need. Is there more?
> 
> We can throw in learning Apache SPF and NGINX.
> 
> 1) First question is this a reasonable idea or am I crazy?
> 
> 2) 2nd question is what skills would I need?
> 
> Thanks!!
> 
> Keith
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