I’ve got several servers which I work on, and quite often, this involves running regular cron’d tasks that perform various backups and configuration updates for me at odd schedules (as an example, my Rust server wipes fortnightly, and needs a config update to change the server name to reflect the last date wiped).

To do things like this, I’ve usually just written a script in PHP and run that at a given interval (daily or otherwise). There’s no real reason I chose PHP to write these scripts aside from familiarity with the language, and no doubt the rest could be easily achieved be it through Python, Shell Script or any other language out there.

For now though, PHP serves my needs just fine.

The problem is, I don’t actually keep these scripts backed up anywhere, or organised in any sort of manner!

The age of GitLab

Over the last couple days, I’ve implemented GitLab into my homelab stack (JT-LAB), and will be using it to store most of my code as a “source of truth” and subsequently sync things to GitHub afterwards (depending on the projects of course).

To the Game Servers, Four Branches…

Based off the various server types; specific branches would be used. For now, these would be:

• Rust
• Minecraft
• Factorio
• Satisfactory

Each game would be represented in its own branch, and based off that branch, would deploy a specific set of commands as needed. For the most part, only Minecraft retains itself in persistence, and the rest rely either on a voted wipe, or scheduled wipe paradigm.

To the File Systems, Five Branches…

Then we have servers with actual file resources and assets that I’d like to keep; things like Photos, Design Assets, old code references, etc. These would be:

• Media
• Design
• Research
• Education
• Maintenance

And nine, nine branches were gifted to the Websites

I also run a number of websites for friends and family on a pro-sumer level. I won’t really list these projects, but they do total up to 9! So it all kind of fits the whole LOTR theme I was going for with these titles.

One Repo to Rule them all…

The decision to build everything into one repository to manage all the core backup operations means I have less to track; for a personal system, I think this is fine. Monolithic design probably isn’t the way to go for a much larger operation than mine though!

Announcing…

Cronjobs

So this is the hypothesized project I’d like to build over the next few days; in combination primarily with jtiong.dev which will help track the commits and such that I do. Writing these projects up here as project whitepapers on a more formal basis might help with some resume stuff going forward for my future career 🙂

So, I’ve got a “main” website – https://jtiong.com (which is currently Error 500’ing)

Which runs on a fairly old version of Laravel. Since it’s inception; the site was used mainly as a central one-stop shop for everything about my presence on the internet. Oh how times have changed.

Nowadays, it makes more sense with a number of domains I own, to split up the content and footprint of my stuff on the internet from a singular jtiong.com website, into a number of different sites based upon what people trying to find me for, or to categorise the activities I do.

Domains I have include:

• jtiong.com (this site) – my personal blog, which is strictly just personal, non-professional stuff
• jtiong.dev – where I hope to eventually host some sort of software development info about myself
• jtiong.network – currently a serverless site experiment, however I hope to change this
• jtiong.com – a central landing page from which people click through to the other domains

So what does this mean?

Two new projects! The .com and .dev domains which will be important as part of my “online resume” so, I really should get them done sooner rather than later…!

However, this also means I need to really look into how I implement these!

Laravel will be driving:

• jtiong.com – a landing page/gateway system
• jtiong.network – services and resources for friends & family

I’m looking at using the Socialite package for Laravel to integrate login via Discord, this’ll mean that certain links and features will only be visible based off friends & family that have certain roles in my Discord server; or at least, that’s been the original intent.

My Own Framework (which I call Spark) – will be driving:

• jtiong.dev – dev blogs, resources

This dev site will be more of a technical dump to keep me consistently working on my coding skills. The setup of this site is a traditional website that’ll ride on the tails of my intended GitLab installation. The fallback of course, is to just use the GitHub API, but I’ll only start looking at that later.

The site should just start listing out my commits and on what projects they’re made on to try and keep things accountable and interesting. It’s just a cool little showcase project.

More features might be added later relevant to doing development work in the future!

Welp, so ends my adventure at the FinTech start up I was at. Things got to a point where they had to let a fairly large chunk of the workforce go with redundancy in order to ensure the business survives.

It happens, but it still sucks.

Still, time to find the next adventure, and in the meantime brush up on personal code projects and stuff that can help me on that search.

So it’s been several days since my last post about C States and power management in the Ryzen stuffing up Unraid OS.

I’m happy to report that things have been rock solid and for the last 90 hours or so, I’ve been solidly downloading my backups from Google Drive (yes, many years worth of data) onto the server. At the same time it’s been actively running as an RTMP bridge for all the security cameras around my house, and as an internal home network portal – all without falling over.

Here’s hoping I didn’t just jinx it….

Update: 8th August 2022 — Unraid’s been running solidly for 10 days + now!

It finally arrived yesterday, after 2 months stuck in postal limbo dealing with customs issues and imports; I am so thrilled to finally have them here. They’re from a craftsman in the US – Dan at Computer Aided Crafting who put this together for me. He does other books as well; but I’m very, very satisfied with his work on this collection. This series has been a huge part of my life; I grew up reading from the end of high school and right through university, and into early adulthood. So alongside Terry Pratchett, this series by Robert Jordan, finished by Brandon Sanderson, holds a special place in my heart.

Very chuffed 🙂

And they smell great!

My sister and her partner have been on a weekend getaway and I’ve been at home working and looking after Panko.

During such a time I’ve been pretty busy and Panko has been stuck amusing himself and moping outside my home office.

The guilt has finally hit me and I’m going to clean up my office so that Panko can hang out with me and chill in my home office. This means I’ll need to clean up all the computer bits, cable manage everything and make sure the room is doggo safe for him to chill in with me. I won’t proof it tot the point that he has free entry but if I’m in the office (I usually am) he can come in and chill too so he doesn’t let his anxiety get the better of him.

The things I do for this dog.

I’m moving all the blog posts I can from my old custom written blog, to this site. So weird posts might start appearing going backwards in time haha 😛

It’ll be nice to have everything in the one site, though.

Update: After 5 hours, it’s finally all done D:

Chatswood has really changed a lot! There’s a whole new shopping centre along Victoria Ave now called Chatswood Place – which has heaps of great places to eat. A few days ago I got to enjoy an all-you-can-eat Japanese BBQ place called Kuro Sakura.

The pricing was pretty reasonable, and depending on the time of the week you were paying either $55 per person (Monday through Wednesday), or $59.90 per person (Thursday through Sunday, and public holidays).

There were additional bolt-on packages you could get with Seafood/Sashimi and Beef Tongue + Wagyu Karubi (Kalbi to the Korean fans), as well as an All you can Drink package for the soft stuff, and the alcoholic stuff. It should be noted though the packages didn’t include Coke Zero or anything diabetic friendly; so it wasn’t the most worth it for me.

The three of us ended up getting the basic $55 package.

The service was fast and prompt – it was actually really great. We were seated in a weird part near the back of the restaurant; and even then any dishes we ordered took only a couple minutes to be delivered to our table. The grill was nice, hot and powerful and I loved the interesting side-mounted exhaust that took in the smoke around the edges of the cooking area.

All in all, I felt this was a pretty great dinner. We ate copious amounts of food, the company made it way better than I think I’d have enjoyed it myself; and the really bizarre, yet funny mini domestic the front of house lady and husband duo had when I went to pay the bill capped the night off.

Also, the Black Sesame Ice Cream was the best after sitting in front of a grill eating meat for 90 minutes. 👍😋

April and May’s been a busy time for both technically for work, and at home with JT-LAB stuff. Work’s been crazy with me working through 3 consecutive weekends to get a software release out the door, and on top of that working to some pretty crazy requests recently from clients.

I had the opportunity to partially implement a one-node version of my previous plans, and ran some personal tests with one server running as a singular node, and a similarly configured server with just docker instances.

I think I can confidently say that for my personal needs, until I get something incredibly complicated going, sticking to a dockerised format for hosting all my sites is my preferred method to go. I thought I’d write out some of the pros and cons I felt applied here:

The Pros of using HA Proxmox

• Uptime
• Security (everyone is fenced off into their own VM)

The Cons of using HA Proxmox

• Hardware requirements – I need at least 3 nodes or an odd number of nodes to maintain quorum. Otherwise I need a QDevice.
  • My servers idle at something between 300 and 500 watts of power;
  • this equates to approximately about $150 per quarter on my power bill, per server.

• Speed – it’s just not as responsive as I’d like, and to hop between sites to do maintenance (as I’m a one-man shop) requires me to log out and in to various VMs.
• Backup processes – I can backup the entire image. It’s not as quick as I’d hoped it to be when I backup and restore a VM in case of critical failure.

The Pros of using Docker

• Speed – it’s all on the one machine, nothing required to move between various VMs
• IP range is not eaten up by various VMs
• Containers use as much or as little as they need to operate
• Backup Processes are simple, I literally can just do a directory copy of the docker mount as I see fit
• Hardware requirements – I have the one node, which should be powerful enough to run all the sites;
  • I’ve acquired newer Dell R330 servers which idle at around 90 watts of power
  • this would literally cut my power bill per server down by 66% per quarter

The Cons of using Docker

• Uptime is not as guaranteed – with a single point of failure, the server going down would take down ALL sites that I host
• Security – yes I can jail users as needed; but if someone breaks out, they’ve got access to all sites and the server itself

All in all, the pros of docker kind of outweigh everything. The cons can be fairly easily mitigated; based off how fast I file copy things or can flick configurations across to another server (of which I will have some spare sitting around)

I’ve been a little bit burnt out from life over May and April, not to mention I caught COVID during the end of April into the start of May; I ended up taking a week unpaid leave, and combined with a fresh PC upgrade – so the finances have been a bit stretched in the budget.

Time to start building up that momentum again and get things rolling. Acquiring dual Dell R330 servers means I have some 1RU newer gen hardware machines to move to; freeing up some of the older hardware, and the new PC build also frees up some other resources.

Exciting Times 😂

For some bizarre reason; WordPress has decided to start hyphenating my posts. I don’t recall it ever doing this originally when I used to use WordPress all those years ago, but it’s ridiculous now. It’s not really a great way to present readable content (at all!)

Luckily it’s also much easier nowadays than having to hack apart the style.css in the theme files editor in the Settings section.

Now, I can just customize stuff > add additional custom CSS and paste in…

.entry-content,
.entry-summary,
.widget-area .widget,
.comment {
	-webkit-hyphens: none;
	-moz-hyphens: none;
	hyphens: none;
	word-wrap: normal;
}

et voila!