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What IS This site?

Posted by adminz – Published on
It's almost alive!
NOT our home lab

This is a site to share my efforts to build a modest home lab. I've always wanted to have a robust and efficient network of computer resources that I can use within my home network and out on the internet. I've played with doing this for years, dabbled in building websites and servers at home. I've tinkered with computers and technology for years, decades really, and as a result I have an enormous amount of older technology hanging around the house (some might say cluttering up the house). I've developed a great respect for repurposing older hardware and I've found that there a LOT of life left in computers that you might not think were usable anymore. I like to use up every once of use from older technology, and I don't like to spend a ton of money on hardware, so I think some of what you'll see in these pages are ways of doing things which does not cost a lot of money but does perform well

 I have hosted a website from home and many more from hosting sites such as GoDaddy.com, but I've always been stuck at not being able to host more than one internet server from my home network. Turns out, it's really easy, in fact there's more than one way of doing it! And by doing so, you can save all the money that you spend on web hosting companies, which can add up if you have multiple sites.

And there's so many ways to implement server computers! Many different operating systems, much different hardware, many many options. I'll take you through some of them and we'll discuss the pros and cons to come up with a way that works for our needs.

WHAT I"M BUILDING

What I'm building will seem modest compared to many in the home lab community. I'm not rack-mounting a lot of expensive equipment. Most of my components are not super expensive. But I think I can get some amazing results out of some modest hardware.

NEXTCLOUD

First of all, I have to have a Nextcloud server. I've been running one for several years and I find it super handy for many things. Most especially I sync my phone's camera to my Nextcloud server, every time I take a picture my phone uploads it to the Nextcloud server, where I can easily access it at my desktop. I have to kick the android client every so often, as it sometimes stops uploading, but that's a minor issue. Nextcloud also collects bookmarks, maintains contacts and is the central source of my calendar that syncs to my phone and desktop. I also use it to make accounts for significant others so I can sync their phones and share files with them. It's must-have software and only seems to get better.

WEB SITES

As previously mentioned, I've had multiple web sites over the years. I've had small vanity ones, I've had a business and created it's full-featured web site, and I tried (years ago) to create a web business based on museums. I owned a lot of domain names because of that business, and a number of web sites. Unfortunately, the business never actually worked out, but I learned a lot about web sites at that time.

Years ago I started using Drupal as my web content management system. Prior to Drupal I evaluated a ton of CM systems, and played with a number of them (this would be around 2007-2010 or so). Joomla, PHP-Nuke and PHP-Fusion, XOOPS and even plinking around with Plone before selling on a CMS that, for the life of me I cannot remember its name. But it had all the features that i was looking for and so I learned building web sites with it. When I got the idea to try and build the web business I thought that I should use a more professional, more widely-known CMS and so switched to Drupal, one that I had been plinking around with. I believe that I started using it at Drupal 5, and got serious with Drupal six, because I remember having to transition to Drupal 7, which I stayed on for a long long time. Somewhere around Drupal 9/10 they lost me, because rather than the standard step-by-step installation and configuration of Drupal, they began requiring users to install it via Composer. Composer is an application-level dependency manager for the PHP programming language. It runs from the command line and installs Drupal and all of its dependencies with one command, and you also use it to install themes and modules. I hated Composer and tapered off my web-building.

Recently I buckled down and learned enough Composer to install and manage Drupal, currently at Version 11.

Never been a  big WordPress fan.