In November 2020, I decided to take the Level 1 Techs Devember Challenge, which is a challenge for anyone to spend an hour a day working on a tech project. The challenge is sponsored by Linode, which offers some free credit for new users taking the challenge. I opted to take the challenge and finally buy a domain and set up my network properly. Since I’ve never had a domain before, my experience with proper networking and dns management were novice at best, so I figured it would take me plenty of time to get things setup. This is the first in a series of blog posts describing what I’ve set up, how I’ve done it, and (in many cases) why. The Level 1 Techs forum has my challenge thread, which consists of my regular musings and learnings of things along the way. It’s a lot of rambling, and half-baked thoughts. This blog series is intended to distill all of that.
Sometime in the summer of 2020 my home router gave up the ghost, so my home network got some upgrades. I decided to go big in my hardware upgrade and move from a pile of stuff to a proper rackmount system with prosumer grade hardware. I purchased the following at that time:
On my home network I was already running a few raspberry pis, a 4-bay Synology Nas, an old desktop that was running as my main server, and my current desktop. Beyond that were all my wifi connected devices. I run quite a few services on my main server including the usual suspects from the folks at linuxserver.io, a private gitea instance and plex. All of these services were running from docker-compose on my server, and to access them I needed to connect to each service by typing in the ip and port for the service (i.e. 192.168.1.11:8080). I tried to host a static site with links, to keep it straight before installing heimdall, but everything was still ip and port, I didn’t have a domain, or dynamic dns setup. I didn’t have a VPN setup either, so managing services while remote was a non-starter. I had great hardware, but my software lagged behind.
My goal for the Level 1 Devember Challenge was to set up a domain as best I could, by giving services and hosts proper names, set up web hosting for this blog on my own hardware, and get a vpn solution in place, so I could manage things while away from home.
The next post in this series will begin explaining what I did in detail.