new post - home server

content/posts/home-server.md

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+---
+title: "Building a home-server"
+date: 2020-06-17
+draft: false
+summary:  "Building a personal home server ..."
+images: [/static/img/server.jpg]
+---
+
+In my ongoing effort to decrease my dependence on other people’s computers, 
+I finally pulled the trigger and build myself a home-server.
+That way I can move all my personal data from the so-called cloud to my home.
+
+The server is build out of my old desktop computer, 
+which saw little to no usage after I bought myself a new notebook to be more portable for uni. 
+All hardware but the case and power supply is repurposed from my old computer.
+I also could have used the case but since the server would be placed in my bedroom[^1] I wanted something silent without fans, 
+so I opted for something passively cooled like the FC-10 Alpha case plus matching power supply from Streacom.
+It’s not cheap but seeing the end result it’s probably worth it, as the case keeps it’s promise of making the PC fully silent.
+The maximum power the i5-6600K processor from Intel dissipates as heat is roughly 100 watts so lightly higher 
+than the Case specified but I have not encountered any cooling-problems after the month of home-server-usage.
+The whole build draws about 30 watts of power which equates to about 0,72 kWh per day.
+Living in germany this equals about 18 cents per day or 5.60 EUR per month of Power used.
+This is similar to most small cloud storage offerings with the benefit of actually owning your personal data 
+yourself and being able to just add storage with the one-time cost of a new drive.
+
+
+When reading up on home-servers and how to build them one topic always has to come up: backups.
+Backups prevent otherwise inevitable data loss.
+So what is my backup-strategy? I use btrfs-Raid1 on my drives, 
+which means having two hard drives mirrored[^2].
+This covers hardware failures… but not software failures which would could just write bad data twice to the drives.
+That’s why there is a third backup on an external hard drive which is not plugged in all the time so 
+when there is software failure or something that kills the drives in the server 
+there is a backup from the past that still contains the intact data.
+There is potential to upgrade this to a backup-server at another place but that’s something I’ll leave for future me to try out.
+
+![Server](/img/server.jpg#center)
+
+For the operating system I opted for Archlinux as I’m most familiar with this Linux-distribution.
+The actual applications are all run in containers and are started by multiple docker-compose files.
+There is a nextcloud instance and a gitea one. In the future i'll maybe look into synapse/matrix and set up some notification channel
+This was the first time messing with software-containerization and docker in particular.
+It turned out to be way easier than I imagined.
+The compose files are organized in a git repo, 
+as its not ready for general usage I didn’t put it online yet[^3], 
+but when i got the time and motivation to finish it I will upload it and post a link to my (selfhosted) repo.
+
+[^1]: One room apartments <3
+[^2]: which means storing everything twice on physically different drives and cutting the total capacity in half sadly
+[^3]: the passwords are all over the docker-compose files. I'll have to look into docker secrets or .env files so im able to delete them from the yaml's.