{"id":5497,"date":"2016-02-16T20:34:27","date_gmt":"2016-02-16T20:34:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/\/?p=5497"},"modified":"2016-02-16T20:36:12","modified_gmt":"2016-02-16T20:36:12","slug":"my-thoughts-2016-is-the-year-of-the-personal-server","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adamchandler.me\/blog\/2016\/02\/16\/my-thoughts-2016-is-the-year-of-the-personal-server\/","title":{"rendered":"My Thoughts: 2016 is the Year of the (personal) Server"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Yahoo!<\/a><\/p>\n

At a Yahoo! Data center in 2009<\/em><\/p>\n

Years of trial and error and experimentation has brought me to a place that is fantastic. I know the use of servers for personal computing is no big deal but I finally have this feeling that everything is where it should be in my computing life. I have everything that I need and aside from standard upgrades, it\u2019s all in place. Sure, there\u2019s the feeling that the iPhone is wasted on me and that\u2019s something I\u2019ll talk about in another post and there\u2019s a fairly immediate need to upgrade my Synology NAS and my iMac in 2016 but the way I compute is effectively perfect.<\/p>\n

It all started in 2012 when I purchased a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with an EU based hosting company at the same time I bought a DD-WRT home router. The VPS taught me a lot. I needed a hosting situation for my blog. That\u2019s always been the key reason to have a web host. With a VPS that had a dual-core 2Ghz processor, 4 gigabytes of RAM and 40 gigabytes of storage, I was able to do a few more things. No, it wasn\u2019t a very fast experience for me but hosting more things like my RSS-Feed Server, personal Wiki site, learning about DNS, PHP, Apache, Security, Backups and SysAdmin of a CentOS machine running WHM \/ CPanel. I also invited a friend to join the server and run his website so it gave me experience with being a reseller and making sure his site was up and running and supporting his services.<\/p>\n

In 2014, I upgraded my home network to be more independent of a computer by purchasing a Synology NAS<\/a>. I started small with a 2-bay system Play which does have a hardware video decoder and dual 6 terabyte drives for a total usable space of 6TB. Soon, I\u2019m going to sell that and upgrade to a 4-Bay Synology that can Decode 4K content via a hardware chip and an additional set of 6TB drives because currently my Synology is a bit crippled with the 6TB of space completely used and 4 hard drives connected to it each with different sets of data and none of them are being backed up automatically with any sort of RAID mirroring. If I could afford a 24 terabyte Synology setup, I would but I currently can\u2019t so from 6 to 12TB usable I will go.<\/p>\n

The Synology project was great! I wrote in April of 2015 that I wasn\u2019t using its fullest potential<\/a>. Since then, I\u2019ve made the entire NAS far more automated with a lot of great things happening. Here\u2019s a taste of what I do with it:<\/p>\n