2014-03-05-home-office-server

Posted on March 5, 2014

Home Office Server Configuration

I use my home office server mainly for backup, personal email and hosting my blog. The backup functionality is of most importance to me and comes in two flavours:

  • instant backup of high-importance documents using Sparkleshare, and
  • weekly backup of everything using déja-dup.

As such, the only services I need running on the server are

  • a http server,
  • a mail server, and
  • an ssh server.

Furthermore, I’ve now automated the provisioning of these. That is, assuming a base OS and an ssh server are functioning.

I’ve also had to move the server from my back room to a more visible part of the house, due to some dodgy wiring. This meant decomissioning my old, faithful, passively cooled Celeron machine in favour of a RaspberryPi. The Celeron box, though passively cooled, needed a fan and a decent sized case. The RaspberryPi simply needs a USB attached storage drive (I’d love to see SATA on board the RPi).

Most of the RPi config is delivered via Puppet. I still don’t know of a good puppet MTA module. I’d prefer exim, but if there was a module that just worked, I don’t care what MTA it might use underneath.