This blog/notes/wiki/web page has been around and on this domain for over 15 years. However it has never really been fully utilized.

I created this initially to learn DNS and Web Hosting technologies such as Apache, nginx, MySQL, PHP, and other technologies that commonly compose a LAMP or LEMP stack in web development.

One of the key challenges that has always plagued me is making the site easy to use, easy to manage, and easy on the wallet. For many years I hosted the site directly from a server in my garage or in my closet. Now it is hosted on a VPS outside of my network. Another concern when hosting a web site is exposure. This is something readily accessible on the Internet.

I think at this point I have found a good starting point:

• A VPS hosted by Linode in a datacenter near my home.
  I enjoy Linode as they provide a simple straight-forward VPS to use without a lot of complications around compute and networking costs and configuration. I also wanted it nearby as I am the primary user, so latency impacting my experience is key.
• A Web stack that is a stack.
  For many years I worked to try and fine tune Apache or nginx and other components of the web stacks to provide the fastest experience possible. So much time was spent fine tuning it that I never used it. Further, it was so finely tuned that I was fearful of updates or changes as things could easily come tumbling down.
  This new iteration uses Docker Compose based around a simple stack of a few different containers. Some of them use a dockerfile to build a customer container – but it is all scripted. If I need to deploy to a new server, it only takes a few minutes to install Docker and spin up the stack.
• A Template.
  The layout/framework of this site has always been the greatest challenge. I am a network engineer not a web designer. However, I think at this point I have a format that is workable and simple. Let’s see if it lasts!

The home lab right now consists of a VMWare vSphere deployment with 2x Lenovo M720q, a SuperMicro Epyc embedded server - which hosts my VM-Series Palo Alto.

I had to deploy an additional switch to accomodate the additional Lenovo connections, but I have full MPIO NFS 4.1 running on them to the Synology NAS.