Planning the Net – WEBSITES, DOMAINS and SERVICES

First thing’s first, I gotta plan out everything I want to run and organize services by bandwidth, server load and thus know where to host them. To leave the current network infrastructure intact, I’ll build my own router with a Raspberry Pi 3 and a fresh Jessie install. Then I’ll add a WiFi Access Point with an SSID, a DNS server, etc…

So here’s a quick link of the webpages I’d like to host:

• Admin Dashboard
  I’ll be using Webmin to monitor and admin the servers (easier than working from the terminal non-stop.)
• Search Engine (low load)
  Pretty straight forward, gotta have a service to search and find other webpages on the net since it’ll all be very new. I’ll most definitely host this one on the Pi Router.
  I’ll most likely use Tipue Search since it’s open-source, responsive, intuitive and very easy to modify. It’s a jQuery search engine and there’s a single JS file holding the content. I’ll post more on this later.
• Social Pages (med/high load)
  Communicating via facebook is a lot easier and more convenient than sending an email (for informal communications.) I haven’t found any yet, but I’m hoping to host a facebook clone, something like a whatsapp/viber server and other clones like an image board or a github repository (for us geeks.)
• Games (low/med load)
  Games are definitely a must for curing boredom. It’ll mainly be browser based PHP games since those require the less load on a server. However there might be some other things I’ll host that require a dedicated server instance running. Write-up pending!
• Wiki (low load)
  Information is most sought of from Wikipedia, so I’ll host a wiki clone, and I’ll pull some actual wiki pages that we may need, or by popularity. I might also make some of my own for some of the tech or other. (Plus who wouldn’t want their own page on Wikipedia?) I’ll most likely use DokuWiki.
• Support (low load)
  You’d be surprised, but there’s no ticketing service here. You have a problem, you either seek out a techie in person, or email them (and I’m the only one here for the winter, so you know I’ll be swamped.) As such, I’ll host osTicket to handle all the tech support tickets and make it easier on me.
• Multimedia (high load)
  Definitely need a shared multimedia server since we’re required to pack our own music and movies on HDDs (there’s a library here, but it’s outdated. We also have a bunch of DVD’s but we need to borrow them from the Commons.) As such, there’ll be Movies with Streama, shorter or custom Videos (like YouTube) with Media Goblin, Music with mStream or Sonerezh, and finally Pictures with Gallery3. Might change these or add others, TBD. Also, Media Goblin can handle pictures and other media types too, so might use it instead of the other services!
• Software Repository (unknown load)
  Since internet is limited, and the bandwidth is minimal at best, I’ll trickle download the most popular software and make them available locally. I’ll just create a quick list with Bootstrap that updates with PHP from a MySQL database, and people can download their favorite software easily.

I’ll be collecting and keeping track of these on this page here! 

These will be split amongst 5 servers, one of which is the router and utility server:

• 172.24.1.1 – Router (webmin + LAMP)
• 172.24.1.2 – Multimedia (LAMP)
• 172.24.1.3 – Software Repo, NAS (LAMP)
• 172.24.1.4 – Wiki, Support (LAMP)
• 172.24.1.5 – Social, Games (LAMP)

More to come soon!

Stay cool!

~Evie