When I started writing this blog, I had put aside a spare Raspberry Pi as kind of “dev” server. A place I could freely install stuff, test out code and run my Ansible playbooks. The main reason to keep this separate from the server which runs all my services was because there was limited disk space on the server1.
One of the biggest challenges was to keep my version of hugo up-to-date and to remember not to publish my blog entries with the draft switch enabled2.
Background There comes a point when just having a shoebox under your bed with all your important documents and files is no longer viable.1 This is especially true if you have some kind of hobby, like genealogy, which tends to explode in the amount papers you need to keep track of. At this point, I’ve filled two folders with about 100 documents worth of family history research and I don’t expect that to stop anytime soon.
I’ve had an LDAP setup for a quite a while1, but I’ve never really used it. Sure, I could set up my Dokuwiki to get the logins and groups from LDAP and that’s kind of what it’s for, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to use LDAP as a central configuration/setup/inventory management system. Configure my mail server to lookup email addresses there, assign port numbers and hosts for my services from there, etc.
I’ve been running some of my services so that they are accessible from the outside world. Some of this has been for fun (like my calibre setup) and some because I want to keep control of my own data. I’ve self-hosted a quite a few services on my NUC now, including things like Plex and tinytinyrss. Many of them have been exposed to the internet as subdomain, so that I could use them both from within my own network and when I’m out and about.