We haven’t used this blog for quite a while, so we figured that we would now to draw up plans for the near future of Freedom Bits.
Lately, I’ve been considering migrating most of the services to my homelab as a way to save on costs after moving to my own apartment. My ISP is fairly generous with assigning multiple public IPv4 addresses to fiber customers, so I thought why not take advantage of it.
I got a Dell PowerEdge R720 (20 core 40 thread monster) with dual Xeon E5-2660 V2’s and 64GB of DDR3 ECC RAM sitting in my apartment. I’m currently learning OPNsense while waiting for my SSD’s to arrive, to use as the drives for the underlying virtual machines hosting all the services. The electricity consumption and fan noise can be a bit overwhelming out of the box, but it can be reduced significantly by tinkering with BIOS settings and iDRAC configuration.
We’ll be using a VPS hosted at a provider that’s okay with what we’re doing to mitigate DDoS attacks, and handle abuse complaints more efficiently. Besides the inconveniences that come with hosting at home, one of the advantages would be having full physical control over the hardware and not having to deal with rogue employees at data centers or the like.
We’re also testing out Authentik to make it possible to log in to all of our services with a single account, so users don’t have to create an individual account for all of our services. It functions in a similar manner to Active Directory, which is also often used in corporate and school environments to facilitate SSO (Single Sign-On) for company devices, email as well as office suites.
Love,
Olivia // Voltrina