Humans are visual 👀 beings. And me personally maybe even more than the average (I love emoji 🙈). So naturally, working with a contacts / address book 📔 like this:

Ever since, but especially since my RAM and CPU upgrade, my server sits idle 💤 pretty much all the time. So I thought: can’t I donate my compute resources? For a long time, especially during COVID 😷, I actually did the same with my iPhone 📱. The Vodafone Foundation has brought out the DreamLab application. It essentially computes exiting stuff like COVID research 🧪 on your smartphones (yes! It is a computer) CPU and GPU (and NNU?).

For quite a long time, I was running on TrueNas Scale 22.02.0.1. However, I noticed in the release notes of the next version (22.02.1), that the docker-compose binary would get disabled. Specifically, the changes in NAS-115010. However, my entire Docker 🐳 setup is based on it. Like Ixian already said on the TrueNas form (🔗 link), I don’t really want to learn about Kubernetes and Ingress. In particular, because I am pretty happy with my Traefik-managed “ingress” variant.

In a previous post, I described my dilemma with having bought the wrong RAM 🐏 kit. Today, I want to report how that story continued and, teaser, ended successfully. As I wrote, I bought another 8-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v4 @ 2.10GHz for € 38,85 on eBay. I couldn’t find the exact CPU cooler 🧊 that I already had. However, I found a slightly bigger version from the same manufacturer and product line (server coolers, made for 24/7 operation): Freezer 34 CO for € 21,02. All parts arrived within a couple of days.

I have always dreamed of having my own email server. Part, because it feels great to can 💪. Part, because of privacy reasons, unlimited quota, and other unnecessary restrictions that typical email providers impose. Part, because of 💰. For a long time, I have been hosting my emails on one.com. Since this year, they charge € 77 per year. That is reasonable, given that they do everything and provide unlimited number of email accounts, but still 🤷‍♂️. Assuming that I will use email for the next 30-50 years, I am looking at costs of a couple of thousands of Euro.

I was always running 32 GB RAM ECC RAM so far (check out my post that describes the system hardware). However, with more and more services being added through Docker 🐳 (my dockerfiles), the RAM was running low sometimes. In particular, when the ZFS file system got hungry too during intense disk IO.

For many years, I had a QNAP TS-853 Pro with 4x 2TB WD Red disks and 4x 3TB WD Read disks. The hardware was (is) very reliable and still running. In fact, I use this NAS now as my backup of the current build. However, the software (QTS) of QNAP is horrible for anything advanced. The kernel is outdated, the security weak, and putting proper security in place really cumbersome. For instance: only the admin user account could be used to ssh into the NAS. At the same time, QNAP recommended disabling the admin account for security reasons. Doing both at the same time wasn’t possible. For 5+ years??? 🤦‍♂.

By default, TrueNas Scale ships Docker 🐳 with Kubernetes (link). However, networking and a few other things are a bit different with Kubernetes. Sadly, I don’t know Kubernetes (yet 😉). So the quickest solution to migrate my existing stack (see my dockerfiles repo) was to simply use vanilla Docker 🐳.

Power outages are very rare, especially in Germany 🇩🇪. But if they do happen, I don’t want to risk loosing my data after a corrupted VDEV. So I thought, I would get a cheap UPS with a backup battery. It should just last long enough to give the server time to shut down properly.

This is my first blog entry 😎.