What a week. Work is work, it’s official. With no lottery win in sight I have to say it’s the daily grind all over again. A few small mods to the website layout and design but I’m a bit happier with it.
I’ve been messing around with emulators and trying to find the best handheld for emulation – I’ve tested PSP, 3DS, Switch and mobile, and tbh they are all a bit lacking. I’ve picked up a PS Vita from eBay as there’s a lot of good press that it’s supposed to be the best so we will see!
My life is uninteresting, so expect uninteresting posts 🙂
The captive screws on the 3DS are officially dead… sigh…
I cant even remember the spec of this thing. I bought it for £100 about 5/6 years ago, maybe more. Ill have to do a boot test and will report back. Its still pretty sexy!
25u Startech rack, Unifi USG, non-POE switch, and I’ve an AC lite access point on the upper landing. There’s a Hue Hub down there to but you cant see it because the spare room is a mess. On the left I’ve random PC bits, as well as my WD Pro NAS that’s not currently connected. I only use it every few months or so for cold storage of everything that’s on Unraid.
The Unraid box is as described somewhere in a post below: Ryzen 3600, 32gb ram, X570 board and 12tb of useable backup storage. I have a 500gb nvme cache and a 4tb parity. I need to buy another parity really, but its okay for now. I run Unraid and docker containers for the unifi controller, plex, and transmission. I have been previously running public-facing nextcloud and wordpress with letsencrypt, duckdns and mariadb, but right now they are disabled. It does what it needs to do and I couldnt be happier 🙂
Yeah this site doesnt have a title because it messes with the formatting of the index page. If I add a title in the index.php then I cant post images.
Meh, after everything it took to get this far, name the site what you want! I’m sure it wont be any more rude than what I have been calling it recently….
3 days… 3 days Ill never get back. Dont get me wrong, Linode is awesome, but their guides are so mixed up it’s unreal. The guides for One Click installs were piecemeal at best. I’m not a total noob with linux and the cli, I am able to learn new things and follow guides, its just flicking about and having to have a knowledge of information that isnt laid out for your verbatim is extremely frustrating and unhelpful for a lazy person such as myself. All I wanted was to set up wordpress and nextcloud, and have an SSL cert for both. Here’s what I did:
I assume you have created a Linode account. Log in, get to the dashboard – this is going to be quick and dirty, sorry, maybe a better write-up at a later date.
Linode WordPress install one-click with SSL certificate:
Click Marketplace on the left of the screen, and select a WordPress – Latest one-click Fill out the appropriate user information and passwords etc make sure if you are using a domain name to add it here Click create
I use Google Domains, add the IP address as an A record to the DNS page (its at the bottom of the screen) Wait for your domain name to resolve the IP so that your site is accessible
Once you can access the site via the domain name, ssh into your instance at the IP address given, either use a terminal app or the built in console ssh root@yourIP Enter your password
So this is where my head scratching began. Almost all the guides you will find for adding an SSL certificate depend on nginx, however, if you try and install nginx it will fail. The answer lay on this guide in really small, grey on blue, text. Instead of using nginx, use apache!
I’ve added it in bold, just in case, like me, you are stupid and miss obvious things. Providing your domain is set up, follow the guide and enter your requested information then check your website. Make sure to forward all requests to https and you should be golden.
The certificate will expire, should you wish to not have to log into your website every time it does, run the command:
sudo certbot renew –dry-run
This should autorenew the certificate when it expires with your information. Also, as the guide advises, back up your certificates somewhere they wont be lost if the worst happens.
Linode Nextcloud install one-click with SSL certificate:
Dont do it, or do it and if you make it work, drop me an email on the address in the box on the right. If you can manage this, you are a great human being and I would love to be you.
I couldnt make it work – there’s a pain with the domain, and the hostname, and then editing files and trying to figure out why it’s adding one to the other and then getting it to work properly with certbot…. urgh, just dont bother. However, I do recommend this video which is what worked for me. Set up an Ubuntu instance, install the snap and then enable the SSL:
So right now this site and my nextcloud site are both set up with SSL, very happy, I can actually start using them proper instead of creating them for a few hours and then nuking them because I made a mess. I appreciate that it’s all about the learnings however I only have a set amount of patience. I’m so glad this is over and done with for now. Any problems over time, Ill undoubtedly make another post.
This isnt the final form, as the room where my rack has been sitting the past few months is a mess, but I realised I hadnt posted a picture of the box since the dusty Proxmox build below. The rack, and this server is rock solid. I love it. Its so flexible. Right now its really just hosting files, Plex with movies and TV shows, Transmission for torrents and my Unifi Controller for my network in docker containers.
I have 12tb of storage and a 4tb parity drive. I also use a 500gb NVMe cache drive to keep things fast.
The system itself is a Zen 2 AMD Ryzen 3600, 32gb of DDR4 RAM and an Asus X570 board. Its fast as fk.
Ill post a pic of the full rack with my Unifi gear in a future post, once it’s less crowded in there.
I started out this week moving this blog from Godaddy, basically because after your first ‘cheap’ year, the cost was going to ramp up to £60 for the luxury of the domain name, more than £100 up front for hosting charges and £50 for an email address. I wasnt happy! I already have email, I would have liked to have kept the domain name but the hosting prices and it all rolled into one was just more than I was willing to pay for a website that I rarely update or even look at. This is just a hobby tinkering website at the end of the day.
So I thought, well, I have my Unraid server, it cant be that difficult to host WordPress myself, right? And it wasnt, not really. There were a few things I had to learn – I already had LetsEncrypt setup, as well as DuckDNS for my Nextcloud server, so it wasnt too much of a stress to get WordPress set up.
However, this is where the paranoia set in – I really want as little (ideally nothing) on my personal home storage server to be public facing and accessible. To me, that just seems like asking for trouble.
I’d heard of Linode through various Youtubers but never really took the time to log in and make an account – I thought Id just give it a try and see what it was like, there’s currently a 60 day $100 credit promotion at the moment and even though I thought I’d never be able to get it working, well, here we are! 🙂
I have basically removed everything from Godaddy, my domain is now with Google domains which is £10 a year (saving £50 straight away!), this hosting is $5 a month, but free for two months through the promotion, and I’m moving Nextcloud to Linode also to host all my images and files and give me ‘cloud access’ via the mobile app on my iPhone – so nothing is now public facing on my server. Should I feel differently in 2 months time when the linode promotion ends, I can spin my server back up and have everything I need in an instant, and that’s reassurance that money cant (well, obviously it can) buy.
The site is certainly more responsive. I’ve opted for the basic Nanode 1GB, 1 core setup for $5 a month, but scaling should be easy and it’s basically very inexpensive as the subscription is rolling with no upfront costs. Class 🙂
Thought of the day: Stress can be overcome with money, or alcohol, or love. If you can’t get over the stress, try applying one of these three things and just watch it melt away. Maybe.
