DevPath | Developer's Journey

What server rack project would it be without a firewall?! I got myself another bargain deal with a WatchGuard Firebox XTM25. I should have enough fun with some Stateful Packet Inspection and Threat protection (such as DoS attacks, fragmented & malformed packets, blended threats, and more), and if I manage to reactivate a WatchGuard subscription I might even get: IPS,…

After mounting and finally managing to have a UPS working, I can guarantee that a NAS will “always” be powered on without disrupting the data availability… I started in a very naive way by plugging my HDD into the Pi, then one of the two almost broke and I had to run take shelter and buy a real NAS.…

It happened already a handful of time that the Raspberry Pi are not reachable in the network, so I need to have a proper way to access them directly. The solution would be a KVM switch, a little overkill for my Pis, but I’m looking for something more flexible.…

After quite a lot of suffering and sweating with my new UPS I managed to finally have it working.…

Now that I have something that is network-connected and which I could use finally, it is time to make sure it has continuous electricity to keep things stable. I picked another deal and managed to get an APC Smart-UPS SC450, with almost new batteries (just 6 months old).…

After having done a little tweak to the rack, I started tackling the networking side. I bought a network switch, I have already 2 Raspberry Pi, so finally, I can connect them to the network, then let them do something (not yet sure what though). Because those Pis without connection they’ll be useless.…

Now that I have got my cool rack assembled I noticed the mess it made on my floor. Unfortunately, I was so busy cleaning it right away, that I didn’t take any pictures of it. 26kg of an empty rack, which most likely is going to be something like 40kg once filled, on my parquet… with screws’ heads scratching it…

Today I’ll be covering the first phase of my new pet project: a server rack. So let’s start with ordering a new rack. Even though most of what I’ll put inside will be second-hand material to save some money, for the rack itself I chose it to be brand new. I ordered this:…

This will be an unusual pet project compared to the one I’ve always done as a programmer. Since I started to get more involved in the infrastructure side, and later in cloud-native, I was always happily dealing with server configuration, process optimisation, provisioning, infrastructure-as-code, and so on.…