Exactly what will be on this site is yet to be determined, but it will primarily be for private use. If you haven’t been invited to make use of bangdash.space, you won’t be able to use or even see most features. If you’re interested in the tech, read on.
Here are the systems I’m planning to implement:
- TangoCloud portal for cloud services supporting our gadgets (NextCloud),
- Webmail and calendar interface (probably NextCloud Groupware),
- TangoHab portal – Home Automation (OpenHab),
- Grocery lists and meal planning (grocy.info)
- Restyaboard to move off Trello kanban board (RestyaBoard)
As you may notice, everything I’m using is open-source. One of the prime goals of this project is keeping direct costs down. I’d rather expend my time and educate myself in the process, than pay money and give up control and privacy.
Other things I am using to move towards self-hosting all the online services my household wishes to use are:
- Edge Router X – If you want to do any serious home networking, your first purchase needs to be a serious router with all the features you need to control traffic properly. I’ve found this little router from Ubiquiti is a great little workhorse. It runs a customised version of open-source dd-wrt.
- Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS for my primary server
- Manjaro Linux for my home desktop
- NGINX is the primary web server powering this site
- Ghost is the CMS/blogging platform that bangdash.space runs on
- WordPress is the CMS/blogging platform that flyingflux.net runs on
- Red Hat’s Ansible for managing the configuration of my server and the services that run on it – This is a work in progress, to slowly move all of my server’s configuration into a backed up configuration, so that I can re-create my setup with a few simple commands if I need to.
- git provides staged implementation and code check-in for my Ansible scripts and configuration in a repository which is synced to a private GitHub repo. I could self-host my own GitLab server, but the remote storage is kind of the point.
- The GNU Image Manipulation Program is the tool I use for all original image assets on my sites (when they aren’t just straight photos I’ve taken or free online images)
There are a few non-self-hosted services I am making use of. Incoming and outgoing emails will use Google Cloud Services and Mailjet free accounts. I’ll post on this when I get it up and running.
One ongoing cost I have is for our off-site (and only) backups, which are stored in Amazon AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage. I’ll do a post describing my backup solution some time – It involves a complete lack of trust in Amazon