Infrastructure

I started a small home project last year (2018) where I had the ambition to become less dependent of Google. I know that I will never become completely free from Google but some information I don’t want to get into the hands of Google (or anybody else for that matter).

I kicked off the project and bought an old workstation (with Xeon E3 CPU) and populated it with 12GB of RAM, since my plan was to run each service as an Docker container to keep down my time for maintenance.

In the beginning I didn’t know which service I would choose to put all my personal data (e.g. Documents, Notes, Photos, Contacts etc.) but after a bit of searching my choice ended up with Nextcloud.

Today I’m very happy with this choice, it fulfills my needs and I can store/sync information from my phone with ease, I have good “notepad” and also a full Office suite (OnlyOffice) for writing documents. The only drawback with this Nextcloud solution is that I had to buy an application (DAVx5) for Calendar and Contact sync.

During the year that have passed I have increased my server park with an additional workstation with a bit more powerful Xeon E3 CPU and have added the following services to my infrastructure:

• gitea - as my GIT repository
• wordpress - for my personal web site
• openvpn - VPN service
• cloudprint - For enable printing from phones (unfortunately the printing goes though Google)
• mailcow - For having an own email domain
• minecraft - So the kids can play on their own server

My experience during this year is that having all services dockerized have reduced my maintenance time, it have improved my productivity and made me less dependent of Google. As a bonus the family can share calendar, files and have an own chat and video call system.