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253
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • allows my mail clients to connect via IMAP to view and search emails

    dovecot will be able to handle this part. This is what I use as a mail archive (once a year, archive all mail from the previous year from various mailboxes to my self-hosted dovecot instance). I wrote this ansible role for it.

    downloads new emails via IMAP

    As others recommended, imapsync should be able to handle that part.

    docker solution

    These tools are simple enough to install and manage (one package, one config file), Docker is not needed. If you really need it to fit into your docker-based setup, build and maintain your own images.

  • What's your existing setup? For such a simple task, check if any of the tools you use currently can be adapted (simple text files on a web server? File sharing like Nextcloud and text files? Pastebin-like? Wiki? ...). Otherwise a simple Shaarli instance could do the trick (just post "notes" aka. bookmarks without an URL). I use this theme to make it nicer. Or maybe a static site generator/blog.

  • I would never recommend Odoo anymore, given how painful it is to upgrade from a major version to another. Their answer to it is basically "yeah, some complex migrations need to be done, just send us a copy of your database with highly sensitive company data, pay us to do the migration and we'll send it back to you". Yeah, lol, no.

  • Windows Servers

    No

    setup automatic responses to the alerts

    It should be possible using script to execute on alarm = /your/custom/remediation-script https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/alerts-&-notifications/notifications/agent-dispatched-notifications/agent-notifications-reference. I have not experimented with this yet, but soon will (implementing a custom notification channel for specific alarms)

    restarting a service if it isn’t answering requests

    I'd rather find the root cause of the downtime/malfunction instead of blindly restarting the service, just my 2 cents.

  • I use netdata (the FOSS agent only, not the cloud offering) on all my servers (physical, VMs...) and stream all metrics to a parent netdata instance. It works extremely well for me.

    Other solutions are too cumbersome and heavy on maintenance for me. You can query netdata from prometheus/grafana [1] if you really need custom dashboards.

    I guess you wouldn't be able to install it on the router/switch but there is a SNMP collector which should be able to query bandwidth info from the network appliances.

    • rsync + basic scripting for periodic sync, or
    • distributed/replicated filesystems for real-time sync (I would start with Ceph)
  • 10000RPM SAS drives are noisy (and expensive), something to keep in mind. If I needed this kind of performance I would probably go full SSD.

  • I agree that desktop/ATX tower PCs are the most useful form factor, you can stuff all your old junk hardware in there and offer it a second life without much investment.

    However with current electricity prices buying more power efficient hardware can be a better medium-term investment. 1kWh bills at 0.2516€ currently where I'm at (~EU average price), assuming an average power consumption of 50W this gives you (50×24×365)/1000×0.2516=110€/year. At this rate a 200€ investment in hardware would pay for itself in 2-3 years.

    Buying a <100€ setup is not worth it for general purpose servers in my opinion, it will either be underpowered or power hungry.

    My current solution is to to run all my services in KVM (libvirt) VMs on my beefy desktop computer which is already on most of the time anyway. Best of both worlds.

    If I had to redo everything I would probably buy a NUC/mini-PC with a good CPU, 64GB RAM and low power consumption, stash a single huge SSD in there, migrate my VMs there and call it a day. But this is not a cheap setup.

  • lsblk also show block devices and is prettier than looking directly at /sys/class/block

  • If this is a "shared hosting" type of server (LAMP stack), you can usually run PHP applications (assuming they are pre-packaged and don't need composer install or similar during the install process). Check https://awesome-selfhosted.net/platforms/php.html