Weekly Update 3: New servers means more fun!

As the week started, I decided it was time to retire a few old servers, and sell them on Kijiji. After 24 hours of posting on Kijiji, I was able to sell and retire two older servers.

As you know, when one server retires, another must take its place — so let me introduce you to Psi. Psi is my newest hypervisor, it’s got an E3-1270v6 CPU, 32 GB DDR4 ECC ram, and 4 TB of storage. It’s a small beast. I’ve also upgraded my bandwidth to a full, symmetrical 1G/1G with backup 1G/1G line.

I found myself only using half of what I had available, so the downgrade was necessary. It also cuts my bill a tiny bit, and frees up some headaches with the old servers. For good or bad, I’ve decided each VM that serves family or friends will have it’s own public WAN IPv4, and be locked in the DMZ. I’m also switching to VyOS for being the router, so all systems will still head through the firewall.

Since I have a /24 IPv4 block, I’m also switching up my PTR record convention. Traditionally, it just reads “ip.thegeekbin.com”, but now it will read {first}-{second}-{third}-{last}.ip.thegeekbin.com. Although not important, it helps me standardize things.

I’m still in the process of reworking my current setup, but I’m going to be creating a new virtual machine for docker to run automation and monitoring tools on my infrastructure (eg grafana, telegraf, etc). I’ve also made the switch from Proxmox to VMWare ESXi, so far I’m loving the interface and simplicity, I’m a bit disappointed in the mobile client on iOS however, it’s very buggy in the browser.

It’s the long weekend, so Monday’s a holiday. We took our son to the fair Saturday and he loved the tractor pulls!

This next week I’m taking a CompTIA certificate on Wednesday, and then relaxing as much as possible. I’m preparing to deploy pihole on Docker and monitor every aspect of this server.

I’m considering getting new monitors or using a new setup, I’d love to get two identical monitors for consistency. We’ll see where this week takes me!