Welcome to sysadminafterdark.com! Today, I am happy to announce the second iteration of this website. The first iteration was hosted on AWS and utilized two gigabytes of memory and two CPU cores. I hit a wall very early on and realized that I could never accomplish what I set out to do in the cloud due mostly to budget requirements. This site, and its backend, are hosted locally in my on-prem homelab, spanning two hosts and a SAN across twenty-one virtual machines and utilizing eighty-two gigabytes of memory, thirteen terabytes of storage, and many CPU cores combined. I’m not even finished deploying servers. Let’s take a look at what’s new and where this project is headed.
What’s New
This website is split into multiple parts, and on the back-end, multiple servers running in thick virtual machines and thin containers across several VLANs and security boundaries. Each section was designed to be minimalist, informative, and friendly for beginners, advanced systems administrators and homelabbers alike. The website is split up as follows:
- Blog – You are here. The blog was designed to be used as finalized knowledge dumps, news, and personal takes.
- Wiki – The wiki was designed to hold all of my personal homelab’s public documentation, standards, and procedures. My goal is to have as much of my network publicly documented as possible. Unlike the blog, this is a living wiki system. Information will change, links will break, and content will change over time as my homelab changes and grows.
- Forum – The forum is a place to ask questions and engage with the community. It is split into multiple different categories based on various topics and technologies.
- Git – My GitLab server serves various scripts, configurations, and other code based things I have developed over the years. You can freely view all in-house developed code by searching and selecting various repositories.
- Uptime – Uptime is a publicly accessible Uptime Kuma dashboard that serves to inform the public the status of all public servers that hold this project together. If you can’t access something, chances are it is down due to error or I have a scheduled maintenance window in place. You can also follow my twitter for the latest status updates.
- Follow Me – A list of links to my various social media profiles. I utilize LinkStack to aggregate as much of my content as possible in one place. In addition to my various social media posts, this website also offers an RSS feed.
- Other Servers – You may have noticed I have other servers listed such as my SSO and Mattermost servers. They allow for communication and authentication for the team and are not publicly accessible.
If you have any feedback you would like to give, you may create an account on the forum and post on the Site Feedback category.
What’s Next
It is currently a priority to document and harden my current setup. My security posture is very good: Your packets just went through a Sophos firewall, a WAF, and a proxy server for you to be here. Oh! Cloudflare too! But I feel I can do better. I would like all of my servers to follow a mix of DoD and CIS hardening procedures. Additionally, I have a spiral bound notebook full of notes taken during initial deployment. These procedures will slowly make their way to the wiki, blog posts, and videos. My ultimate goal is to have as much of my lab publicly documented as possible so everyone can see how things work on the backend.
Start the discussion at forum.sysadminafterdark.com