Just a short little update to myself that I’ll keep. I’ve acquired:

• Dell R330 – R330-1
  • 4 x 500GB SSD
  • 2 x 350w PSU
  • 1 x Rail Kit
  • INSTALLED AND READY TO GO
• Dell R330 – R330-2
  • 4 x 500GB SSD
  • 1 x 350w PSU (need to order 1)
  • 1 x Rail Kit (just ordered)
  • Awaiting PSU, and Rail Kit

These are going to help me decommission my Dell R710 servers. Trusty as they are, they’ve reached their end of life, for sure. I’ll keep them as absolute backup machines; but will not be using them on active duty anymore.

R330-1

• Websites

R330-2

• Rust (Fortnightly)
• Project Zomboid (Fortnightly)
• Minecraft (Active Version)

It’s actually been pretty tricky keeping a decent track of everything; so I’ve recently signed on for some Free Plan tiered Atlassian services using Jira and Confluence. Something a little formal for my use.

I’m moving all the blog posts I can from my old custom written blog, to this site. So weird posts might start appearing going backwards in time haha 😛

It’ll be nice to have everything in the one site, though.

Update: After 5 hours, it’s finally all done D:

Chatswood has really changed a lot! There’s a whole new shopping centre along Victoria Ave now called Chatswood Place – which has heaps of great places to eat. A few days ago I got to enjoy an all-you-can-eat Japanese BBQ place called Kuro Sakura.

The pricing was pretty reasonable, and depending on the time of the week you were paying either $55 per person (Monday through Wednesday), or $59.90 per person (Thursday through Sunday, and public holidays).

There were additional bolt-on packages you could get with Seafood/Sashimi and Beef Tongue + Wagyu Karubi (Kalbi to the Korean fans), as well as an All you can Drink package for the soft stuff, and the alcoholic stuff. It should be noted though the packages didn’t include Coke Zero or anything diabetic friendly; so it wasn’t the most worth it for me.

The three of us ended up getting the basic $55 package.

The service was fast and prompt – it was actually really great. We were seated in a weird part near the back of the restaurant; and even then any dishes we ordered took only a couple minutes to be delivered to our table. The grill was nice, hot and powerful and I loved the interesting side-mounted exhaust that took in the smoke around the edges of the cooking area.

All in all, I felt this was a pretty great dinner. We ate copious amounts of food, the company made it way better than I think I’d have enjoyed it myself; and the really bizarre, yet funny mini domestic the front of house lady and husband duo had when I went to pay the bill capped the night off.

Also, the Black Sesame Ice Cream was the best after sitting in front of a grill eating meat for 90 minutes. 👍😋

April and May’s been a busy time for both technically for work, and at home with JT-LAB stuff. Work’s been crazy with me working through 3 consecutive weekends to get a software release out the door, and on top of that working to some pretty crazy requests recently from clients.

I had the opportunity to partially implement a one-node version of my previous plans, and ran some personal tests with one server running as a singular node, and a similarly configured server with just docker instances.

I think I can confidently say that for my personal needs, until I get something incredibly complicated going, sticking to a dockerised format for hosting all my sites is my preferred method to go. I thought I’d write out some of the pros and cons I felt applied here:

The Pros of using HA Proxmox

• Uptime
• Security (everyone is fenced off into their own VM)

The Cons of using HA Proxmox

• Hardware requirements – I need at least 3 nodes or an odd number of nodes to maintain quorum. Otherwise I need a QDevice.
  • My servers idle at something between 300 and 500 watts of power;
  • this equates to approximately about $150 per quarter on my power bill, per server.

• Speed – it’s just not as responsive as I’d like, and to hop between sites to do maintenance (as I’m a one-man shop) requires me to log out and in to various VMs.
• Backup processes – I can backup the entire image. It’s not as quick as I’d hoped it to be when I backup and restore a VM in case of critical failure.

The Pros of using Docker

• Speed – it’s all on the one machine, nothing required to move between various VMs
• IP range is not eaten up by various VMs
• Containers use as much or as little as they need to operate
• Backup Processes are simple, I literally can just do a directory copy of the docker mount as I see fit
• Hardware requirements – I have the one node, which should be powerful enough to run all the sites;
  • I’ve acquired newer Dell R330 servers which idle at around 90 watts of power
  • this would literally cut my power bill per server down by 66% per quarter

The Cons of using Docker

• Uptime is not as guaranteed – with a single point of failure, the server going down would take down ALL sites that I host
• Security – yes I can jail users as needed; but if someone breaks out, they’ve got access to all sites and the server itself

All in all, the pros of docker kind of outweigh everything. The cons can be fairly easily mitigated; based off how fast I file copy things or can flick configurations across to another server (of which I will have some spare sitting around)

I’ve been a little bit burnt out from life over May and April, not to mention I caught COVID during the end of April into the start of May; I ended up taking a week unpaid leave, and combined with a fresh PC upgrade – so the finances have been a bit stretched in the budget.

Time to start building up that momentum again and get things rolling. Acquiring dual Dell R330 servers means I have some 1RU newer gen hardware machines to move to; freeing up some of the older hardware, and the new PC build also frees up some other resources.

Exciting Times 😂