Small experiment network independence
About a year ago I decided to conduct a small experiment for myself. I noticed that binding to cloud services is becoming more penetrating, and I thought to check what was actually needed in order to get rid of the servers of various beaver corporations.
The task was to try how powerful or simple hardware needed for a small home server to start services that we so easily transfer to corporations.
First, iron: I needed a practically minimal piece of hardware that would be turned on 24 hours a day, consumed a minimum of electricity, and at the same time worked as stable as possible. Just coincided that I have become unnecessary appletv past generation. The device was a very good challenger - it can hang permanently on, without failures, the power supply inside, the body is aluminum and works like a passive radiator. Further operation confirmed the choice.
Since we have a fairly weak hardware: 1GHz Pentium M, 256MB Ram (yes, yes, we’ll be able to twist everything with just 256 megabytes of memory). and a 140GB disk, I chose Gentoo - I need full control to ensure that all software is as close as possible to hardware. At the same time to enhance security, why not choose the hardened gentoo? On Habré already considered the installation: see the list by the user powerman
')
The installation on the appletv was not particularly difficult - a patch stick usb flash drive is made and then the disk is broken according to the instructions and everything is pretty standard.
The first purpose of the device was to transfer mail from gmail. There were no difficulties here: postfix, cyrus-imap with the autocreate patch, open ports 993,587 as standard and turn on sieve for 2000 in addition - why not just sort your mail with your own rules? at the same time thunderbird has a plugin. Total coped with this task perfectly. I found a plus in the fact that, for example, with an iphone, it is noticeable that connecting-checking mail goes much faster than driving through gmail.
It's amazing that something lightweight is hard to find. I didn’t want to put ical from apple at all - as for me there is a terrible jumble of complexity. Nevertheless, there was a great alternative - Baïkal - a fairly easy CardDav / CalDav server, the base in sqlite. We set that in a network looked through ngnix and php-fpm through https - we check resources - at least. Synchronize iphone / android / ical / addressbook / other - everything is fine. For thunderbird we find SOGo Connector - all contacts are synchronized with us. (surprisingly little attention in various software to the rather high value of contacts)
The first bell that my experiment is going in the right direction - the closure of Google Reader. The search for alternatives did not take long - I stopped at tinytiny-rss . True, it depends on mysql, which I did not want to put, but an interesting article about z-ram just arrived and I allocated 64MB to zram and picked up mysql and tt-rss.
For the most important and not so large in size - mail and mercurial repositories tarsnap was used weekly (encrypted and worth a penny), plus every day through the most common rsync on 4TB network drive - its own "time machine" . I also think why not additionally encrypt incoming emails and add them to gmail - let google store but not dig in the content.
The device with gentoo linux turned out to be surprisingly stable. If you do not update the kernel, it is quite possible to twist uptime for a couple of years. I usually have a couple of months - I can upgrade the kernel. Taking into account all the additional buns that are spinning (mercurial repositories and a couple of trac via nginx), it is surprising that all of this fit into 256MB of memory. load average: 0.01, 0.04, 0.12. Shallow internal fan can be completely disabled.
By today's standards, a frankly weak device nevertheless copes with the most necessary - mail, calendars, contacts, rss. Do we really need these cloud services to store a bunch of personal information? I still think to try ownCloud.
Recently, it was thought, what prevents google to close gmail when it becomes not the main field of activity? Why not, google is now intensively entering the automotive business. In the future, they can become a supplier of automotive navigation systems and supply hundreds of millions of installations and manage the entire infrastructure of roads - (a business worth about a trillion?) - then closing may well be a matter of time.
The task was to try how powerful or simple hardware needed for a small home server to start services that we so easily transfer to corporations.
Iron
First, iron: I needed a practically minimal piece of hardware that would be turned on 24 hours a day, consumed a minimum of electricity, and at the same time worked as stable as possible. Just coincided that I have become unnecessary appletv past generation. The device was a very good challenger - it can hang permanently on, without failures, the power supply inside, the body is aluminum and works like a passive radiator. Further operation confirmed the choice.
Distributive
Since we have a fairly weak hardware: 1GHz Pentium M, 256MB Ram (yes, yes, we’ll be able to twist everything with just 256 megabytes of memory). and a 140GB disk, I chose Gentoo - I need full control to ensure that all software is as close as possible to hardware. At the same time to enhance security, why not choose the hardened gentoo? On Habré already considered the installation: see the list by the user powerman
')
The installation on the appletv was not particularly difficult - a patch stick usb flash drive is made and then the disk is broken according to the instructions and everything is pretty standard.
Soft
post office
The first purpose of the device was to transfer mail from gmail. There were no difficulties here: postfix, cyrus-imap with the autocreate patch, open ports 993,587 as standard and turn on sieve for 2000 in addition - why not just sort your mail with your own rules? at the same time thunderbird has a plugin. Total coped with this task perfectly. I found a plus in the fact that, for example, with an iphone, it is noticeable that connecting-checking mail goes much faster than driving through gmail.
Contacts / Calendars
It's amazing that something lightweight is hard to find. I didn’t want to put ical from apple at all - as for me there is a terrible jumble of complexity. Nevertheless, there was a great alternative - Baïkal - a fairly easy CardDav / CalDav server, the base in sqlite. We set that in a network looked through ngnix and php-fpm through https - we check resources - at least. Synchronize iphone / android / ical / addressbook / other - everything is fine. For thunderbird we find SOGo Connector - all contacts are synchronized with us. (surprisingly little attention in various software to the rather high value of contacts)
Google reader
The first bell that my experiment is going in the right direction - the closure of Google Reader. The search for alternatives did not take long - I stopped at tinytiny-rss . True, it depends on mysql, which I did not want to put, but an interesting article about z-ram just arrived and I allocated 64MB to zram and picked up mysql and tt-rss.
Backup
For the most important and not so large in size - mail and mercurial repositories tarsnap was used weekly (encrypted and worth a penny), plus every day through the most common rsync on 4TB network drive - its own "time machine" . I also think why not additionally encrypt incoming emails and add them to gmail - let google store but not dig in the content.
Stability
The device with gentoo linux turned out to be surprisingly stable. If you do not update the kernel, it is quite possible to twist uptime for a couple of years. I usually have a couple of months - I can upgrade the kernel. Taking into account all the additional buns that are spinning (mercurial repositories and a couple of trac via nginx), it is surprising that all of this fit into 256MB of memory. load average: 0.01, 0.04, 0.12. Shallow internal fan can be completely disabled.
Total
By today's standards, a frankly weak device nevertheless copes with the most necessary - mail, calendars, contacts, rss. Do we really need these cloud services to store a bunch of personal information? I still think to try ownCloud.
What else will close Google?
Recently, it was thought, what prevents google to close gmail when it becomes not the main field of activity? Why not, google is now intensively entering the automotive business. In the future, they can become a supplier of automotive navigation systems and supply hundreds of millions of installations and manage the entire infrastructure of roads - (a business worth about a trillion?) - then closing may well be a matter of time.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/180295/
All Articles