12 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
12 lines
2.1 KiB
Plaintext
One of my most prominent and biggest projects has got to be my homelab server. I have spend many hundreds of hours tinkering and improving it over the course of a couple years that I now use it everyday, whether for network storage, a shadowsocks VPN, a game server, or just as a website.
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At the start I had only a single HP PROLIANT N36L Gen 7 MicroServer (<a href='https://www.itpro.com/630898/hp-proliant-microserver-n36l-review'>Third-party review</a>) which was very much a low grade NAS for people who want to run many different services without needing to worry about speed and network speeds.
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!image assets/img/projects/server_setup/hp_proliant_preview.png
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With only 2 cpu cores and 2 GB of memory it was only good for very simple tasks which was fine enough when I was just starting out with homelabbing
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But then my laptop that I was using for school broke because the hinge gave out (because it was a crappy HP laptop hinge) and was breaking the screen, making it so that it was only usable as a server. So I plugged in an ethernet adapter and a 1TB USB SSD and hooked it up to my "cluster"
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!image assets/img/projects/server_setup/laptop_setup.jpg
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I wanted to try and install a new operating system on it, and since I was in my distrohopping phase I wanted to try installing Arch Linux on it, since I figure that would allow it to be actually usable rather than in it's chromeOS state
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The main issue was that the current operating system had a lock on it that made it so that you as a student wouldn't be able to boot into a different operating system, either through installing a new OS on the current drive or through using a LiveCD.
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So what I had to do was go INTO the currently installed operating system, toggle a setting, and then use a tool that would install <a href='https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/'>ChromeFlex</a>, which basically acted as an intermediary operating system so that I could unlock the actual firmware, letting me plug in a better drive
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Now that I could put in my own drive and not have the device yell at me for not having a ChromeOS operating system I went ahead and installed Arch Linux on the drive and booted it up
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