unRAIDing It Up

This picture is a great representation of how I’ve learned to use LXC/LXD containers. Also, many preconfigured apps, I’ve learned, can be easily installed on unRAID. Again, I’m doing this as a personal project, so I’m quite lazy when it comes to configuring things.

So far, Plex and a PXE test VM are running under unRAID, with other operating systems being test-installed on it as I move onward. The default snap of Nextcloud that gets installed with a stock Ubuntu Server 18.04.01 release doesn’t seem to work as well as Nextcloud in a docker container for unRAID. Learning more about this as I go on, but also working with my group to get our Senior Design project up and running on this as well.

DDNS is a great service…

College Woes and a Quick Update

Now that I’ve started yet another semester of college, it seems that I have vast amounts of homework related to core classes that have been forced upon my schedule at the last minute. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be working on the following things:

• Licensing the unRAID server

• Installing Xen on the “bigboi” server

• Hosting some applications and game servers in LXC containers to check out how they’re useful

• Hosting our Senior Design capstone project in a vm, though I’ve never played with Xen so I might go down a rabbit hole

• Building Kodi boxes, retro consoles etc with the remaining Raspberry Pis I have, in order to reduce the number of projects I have

• Prepare for moving back to the West Coast in June

That’s all for now! This is a quick update!

Progress on The Lakka Box

Now that yet another college semester has arrived, I find myself yet again with a flexible schedule and yet more coursework than ever before. Good thing I have my personal projects continuing to motivate me forward! I've always felt that college should be to teach you instead of loading you down with unnecessary work. Nonetheless, that rant is for a different time.

Recently, I've made more progress on that Lakka Box project I started a while ago. My goal is to finish a project a week until I can finally get to rack-mounting my servers that have been lying dormant, thereby allowing me to make a lot more headway on the Scraper and VPS Instances projects. I've been toying with ideas for hypervisors for the VPS Instances project, but I heavily doubt my front-end I'd be presenting to my friends and family would look as good as DO's or Vultr's.  

You can see my Lakka Box progress here...

Back to School!

It's that time of year again! Back to school at University of Cincinnati. Thus far in my college career, I've been at three universities. Butler University in Indianapolis was overpriced and decided to get rid of my major, then Eastern Michigan was great for two years...however later on, they had a reshuffling of management and teachers in the college of Cybersecurity and my graduation date was murky.

After heading to the University of Cincinnati, I basically restarted my entire college experience. Not accepting most of my core classes from Butler nor EMU, I had to retake Java and many other basic classes. To me, this seemed more like a money grab than anything, but what college in the USA isn't? I started at UC in 2016 and it seems that I'll be on the "seven year plan" to being finished in 2019, starting college in 2012.

Here's to hoping this semester of catching up goes swimmingly! I do enjoy the social aspects of college, and learn more talking to teachers in after-hours than I do in classes. Here we go!