I self-host this domain. Behind this website is a small pizza box server running a linux distro in a vm. Setting it up was straightforward and this post is a note to myself and others. List of quirks that I faced while setting up:
- Turns out that iDRAC6 does not work as expected with Ubuntu’s default OpenJDK version 11. The keystrokes don’t go all the way to the console. Icedtea throws errors when started through a terminal. I had to install OpenJDK version 8 to make it work.
- I have a Dell PowerEdge r710 with Perc 6/i. 6/i does not support disks larger than 2TiB. All the
disks I have are larger than 3TiB. I had to upgrade it to LSI H200 which is a lot more convenient
to run ZFS as it supports TI mode.
- When attached those disks and added vdisks to PERC, the controller wrote to my disks corruption my zfs volume. Thanks to raidz I did not lose data. I also had a backup copy somewhere else.
- zpool status -v rocks!
- You can buy can an H200 variant. It doesn’t have to be one from Dell. There are several tutorials including this one which helps you made that card Dell/r710 compatible.
- Avoid rsync based workflows for large datasets.
- Let’s Encrypt is a pretty cool service if you do not want to pay for SSL certificates.
- Services, ports, and reverse proxies. I use Nginx reverse proxy to map a port to a subdomain. This works well when the number of subdomains or services that you have is a handful. Nginx Proxy Manager also makes helps you setup http to https forwarding with few clicks.
r720 Link to heading
- r720 came with h710 mini. To put it in jbod mode I had to flash a custom(lsi) firmware for this
guide. Most of the steps went smoothely. I deciced to flash uefi as my old system was running on uefi.
- Post firmware installation, I had to change setting in startup to use uefi to boot.
This post might become a living document that sees frequent updates maybe not. What were some of the quirks that you have encountered self-hosting your services?