Sysadmin on Treadwell

I Built a NAS

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

So uh - yeah I built a nas.

I ended up deciding to build a NAS as OVH pissed me off with the throttling me when uploading. I’ve also wanted to build a NAS for a while.

Really the biggest thing that pushed me to pull the trigger was when I came across an amazing deal on eBay. For $430 I got the following:

SuperMicro X11SSH-TF
Micron 64GB DDR4 ECC Ram
Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1245 v5 Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1240L v5
Samsung 960 Pro 512GB M.2
SuperMicro AOC-SLG3-2E4
4x Samsung 850 Pro 256GB
Some other misc stuff like cables, additional pci m.2 card, and m.2 enclosures for the AOC card.

The rest of the components are as follows:

How I Handle Backups

Sun, 02 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The normal rule is 3-2-1 - 3 backups, 2 onsite, 1 offsite. However I do 2 offsite only. I may do a third offsite, but not sure just yet.

I use Scaleway’s C14 Cold Storage. I used OVH Archive, but the upload speeds were super slow.

In proxmox I edited the /etc/vzdump.conf and added script: /path/to/my/perl/script.pl at the bottom. When I run vzdump from the ui or proxmox kicks off a backup cron the script will get ran.

Colocating My Server

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Colocating a server is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time and I just never have until now. Over the years I’ve had numerous machines that I could’ve easily colocated (several 1U machines), but it has been too expensive. JoesDatacenter has been around for a long time - even before I started my home lab, but it was a matter of shipping the server(s) or driving to Kansas City, MO. Driving is exactly what we did. Oh yeah, I decided to take my mom with me as a 3-day vacation - since she needed time away from our city also. During the trip, I was able to stop and meet one of our staff and I even gave him 4 of my old monitors (the 6 1080p monitors) as I wasn’t using them. The round trip cost me ~$700 and 3 days. I could’ve shipped the server for much cheaper, but I’d rather take it to the data center and have a mini-vacation - plus our staff member wouldn’t have got free monitors so I’m fine with the cost. I even stopped to visit with my brother and give him my old pc case (W200) and 2 monitors.

Using GoAccess

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

**UPDATE: I recently changed from a crontab to using the websocket and it works great. This post was extremely useful when setting up the websocket. (also some nginx info around the web) **

 
goaccess /var/log/nginx/access.log -o /var/www/report.html --log-format=COMBINED --real-time-html --ws-url=wss://domain:443/ws --port 7890 --daemon

This year I built a middleware for Django to store data on visitors to websites. It would store things like the page they view, the site that referred them, and their IP address/country. This worked fine for the longest time, but it’s very redundant since I already have this information in my Nginx (HTTP server) logs and it was stored in my database for my website. I still have one model (table) that I store just to keep a copy of it in case I delete the logs from Nginx.