NirusLaboratories
E2Test chambers
ACTIVE 08/ 16

The data centre

Test chamber 08. Please do not unplug anything.

The data centre

A server rack full of boxes that hold each other up. An old gaming laptop now works as a server, a NAS keeps the data, and a virtual machine runs almost everything else. Here is how it fits together, and what happens when it does not.

Services25
Backupsevery night
LoginPasskey
DocsDE + EN

Experimental setup

  1. 01
    The laptop. zion, a retired 17-inch gaming laptop with Proxmox. It runs the family cloud with Nextcloud, the Matrix chat and the login service.
  2. 02
    The NAS. Storage for everything and host for virtual machines at the same time. That is where the backups land every night.
  3. 03
    The engine room. One single virtual machine carries almost the whole lab: DNS, ad blocker, websites, database, notes, search. If it is down, you notice immediately. That is why it is the first thing to be rebuilt.
  4. 04
    The front door. Everything that comes in from outside over HTTPS goes through Caddy. It shows the certificate and hands out by name.
  5. 05
    The login. Pocket ID signs you in everywhere with a passkey: chat, cloud, photos, door, control room. One account, no password.
  6. 06
    The guard. Uptime Kuma checks around the clock whether everything is running, and speaks up when it is not. More in chamber 14.

What runs here

Roughly sorted by purpose. Where there is an official page, it is linked.

Everything is backed up, every night: each server puts its backup on the NAS, the laptop also on a Proxmox Backup Server.

Why?

Because you only understand what you run yourself. And because it is fun when an old laptop gets a second life as a server.

For every service there are instructions to rebuild it from scratch, in German and in English. For the day something really breaks.

Test result

Passed, mostly. In October a Raspberry Pi with failing storage took the chat down with it. It was moved into a virtual machine and has not complained since.