ALLAN JAMES EDGAR

This project came from a curiosity to see what I could do with an old macbook. Instead of just letting it collect dust I flashed it with Debian and set about making it work for me. This setup was called KIONGOZI, Swahili for leader and fit nicely into my K based naming scheme. Apart from Raspberry Pi's this was my first foray into Linuxing and things went well. I did a proverbial buttload of learning about general sysadmin and became intimately knowledgeable about the config and comms of the most prevalent services. The issues came once I had my services up and running I tried something more ambitious then subsequently messed it up, leading me to break something irreparably, and restore from backup or worse, start from scratch.

Fortunately I'd been doing some reading up on virtualisation and it was about this time that I managed to get my hands on two broken down Poweredge t610s. Between them I managed to splice one functioning machine, and thus was born what was to become my new home server codename: KONG. After I got her up and running I upgraded the CPUs to dual Xeon X5670s which while only being a couple of years newer than the replaced ones, they had 6 cores each as opposed to 4 and were hyperthread enabled. This brought me up to a tasty vcore count of 24. In my mind this meant that even if I went mental with the VMs they would still have a least a dedicated virtual core each. There were already 4x600gb sas drives attatched to the raid card but I decided I wanted the hypervisor and the OS images on solid state so I bought 2 120GB SSDs and raided those too. You know because 'amateur hour' over here REALLY needs to spin up his servers quickly lol. Lastly I put in some more RAM that was the end of the upgrade.

To get my feet wet with virtualisation I started off by flashing it with the vmware esxi and got a few services up and running. It was really friendly and nice to use (Very heavily guified). However, some secondary features were locked until you run a datacentre config and pay some datacentre money so my neck-beard gave me the itch to go open source so I replaced it with ProxMox. This had a little steeper learning curve but it was debian based, which gave me a leg up, and had all of the features unlocked if you were willing to spend some time in the man pages. We've gotten along well ever since. The ability to template machines means I can have another debian instance in seconds and the management interface is rock solid considering it's FOSS. My current service stack is running is running a; transmission, samba backed onto NFS(running on those SAS drives mentioned earlier), compile and compute , Plex media hub, backuppc, LAMP, email, git, owncloud, puppet and a couple of dev environments. This project taught me a lot about how to manage service deployment but more importantly the underlying protocols, configurations and communications that are the bedrock all of the services we take for granted in the modern age.