I’ve been really busy these last few weeks setting up all sorts of IT related things since I moved to a new home with a 500 mbps fiber connection to the mother-milk-tit we call the internet. I was really getting into learning all there is to know about the 100% free Sophos UTM for Home use. But when I messed up the whole configuration and basically broke it, I decided to forget about Sophos for now and rent my server from a third party in stead of hosting everything myself. I wish I’d done that sooner. All they gave me was a fresh Ubuntu installation and root access through SSH, but that’s all you need really. So I had some fun setting up that server as a webhost with a solid free admin panel. I’m not hosting any big websites or major content. Just some personal sites and a testlab environment that I consider like my personal playground, but for grown-ups.
I also built three game servers. One for Counter-Strike 1.6, one for CS:Source and one for CS:GO. Basic administration for these are done by a pretty descent free admin panel called Bright Game Panel. Also I host a website that will retrieve the game server log files and convert them in to readable stats and shows them nicely on a website running a HLstats clone.
Also a internet radio station that I setup is now live on air for 24/7 and it plays house music from between 1996 and 2006. Mostly the harder styles like techno, hardstyle and hardcore.
The thing that took me a the most effort was to set up was a VPN server on this remote linux server that has no desktop environment. This is pretty easy to setup if you decide to use OpenVPN but the thing is that I don’t want to be forced in using separate client sotware on my workstation/laptop. I wanted to be able to use the windows built-in options to create a VPN connenction. Eventually I managed to get it to work after many hours of reading through forums and such, but I can now safely connect to my remote server and administrate it without the need to open all sorts of exotic ports to it.
Last thing I want to build is a server at a different address that will mirror all the sites I host including the databases so that means I will have to read up a bit more on how to use the replicate function that MySQL offers. Work in progress!
I plan to post additional information about the things I’ve been working on on this website that can be considered as step-by-step guides that everybody is free to use for themselves. But this has lower priority for me right now because next to all my little projects I also want to play some more of the new expansion Legion for World of Warcraft. It was released not long ago and everybody is making progress pretty fast and I don’t want to fall behind tóó far. I’m already behind in the sense that I’m not yet able to join groups for raiding so one of my in-game priorities is to gather better gear so my item-level will be acceptable so that I can join groups and experience the new raid content.
So many things to do, so little… oh no wait I have plenty of time. Perhaps I should stop right here and now with writing for this silly blog of mine and start focusing on what I’ve been writing about.