Overview

I have a fairly extensive set of servers that I have for running my services. I use these all over the place. I have a machine I own at home, as well as a handful of cloud systems that I get in the Oracle Always Free Tier. The machine at home has a very powerful CPU so that I can run Minecraft servers on it effectively. My main use for the cloud machines is that I have multiple public IP addresses at my disposal, which makes it very safe for me to have public facing services.

Home Server Details

I have a very odd home server, I tripped on a well discounted Lenovo gaming PC and decided to buy it to improve my Minecraft server hosting and to give me a local home lab. The machine of course needed some work to really be usable for running servers though. The first issue was the operating system, since it obviously came with Windows. I found myself wanting to use Proxmox, which is popular for home use, and is used in some enterprise systems, although Lenovo tries to prevent that with some bios settings, but it wasn’t hard to disable them and boot Proxmox on it. From there a bit of configuration and an ethernet cable and I had a web GUI for creating virtual machines and containers with ease.

Cloud Systems Details

This was actually my first experience in Linux. I was trying to setup a Minecraft server using the Oracle Always Free Tier, and succeeded. I learned the minimal Linux commands to run a Minecraft server, and it did the job for a while. Once it got too big for the hardware I got a dedicated machine from Psychz and used that as my Minecraft server for a while. Almost a year later I ended up getting more into Linux and tech as a whole and learned more about how to use it. Now I run my public facing services on my Oracle machines. Even with a much more powerful machine at home I have plenty of use for the cloud.