Jump to content
Main menu
Main menu
move to sidebar
hide
Navigation
Main page
Recent changes
Help about MediaWiki
FUTO
Search
Search
Appearance
Create account
Log in
Personal tools
Create account
Log in
Pages for logged out editors
learn more
Contributions
Talk
Editing
Introduction to a Self Managed Life: a 13 hour & 28 minute presentation by FUTO software
(section)
Main Page
Discussion
English
Read
Edit
Edit source
View history
Tools
Tools
move to sidebar
hide
Actions
Read
Edit
Edit source
View history
General
What links here
Related changes
Special pages
Page information
Appearance
move to sidebar
hide
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
== Installing Ubuntu Linux == For our server’s operating system, we’re going with Ubuntu Linux. Why Ubuntu? If you’re watching this, you’re probably more of a newbie than an expert. Ubuntu is user-friendly, has good documentation, and has a huge community ready to help. It’s widely renowned as the first “newbie friendly” GNU/Linux distribution, dating back to 2006 when it was one of the few distros that ''[https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=review-ubuntu didn’t require torturing yourself with ndiswrapper to get wifi working]''. Robert Storey put it best: “''The huge collection of Linux/BSD systems listed on DistroWatch is a testimonial to how difficult it is to make a decision. However, after spending weeks trying to get XYZ distro to recognize your wireless card, it’s really nice to have an OS that just works.”'' Imagine having a laptop as your only computer, before smartphones with tethering were widely available. You don’t have access to a wired connection. Where were you getting your drivers from? Maybe you do have access to a wireless connection, but your only CAT5 cable is 5 feet long. And your router is in an un-air-conditioned garage. In the middle of summer. So you go to your 98°F garage, sit on the floor, googling only to find a plethora of threads where elitist douchebags tell you to RTFM to get wifi to work. And they wonder why people used closed source operating systems… In 2005, the concept of anything in GNU/Linux ''“just working”'' was a joke. If you wanted to burn a CD you had to set up something called [https://forums.justlinux.com/showthread.php?29773-ide-scsi-emulation-isn-t-working SCSI emulation] to use the optical drive on your computer. From the ground up, GNU/Linux was fundamentally not designed for normal people. Ubuntu changed that in a radical way and continues to have a reputation for being a newbie-friendly ''“gateway drug”'' to GNU/Linux. It’s not the best and it has its flaws, but it is designed and developed with ease of use for normal people in mind. For a beginner’s guide, that matters. <span id="why-not-arch-or-gentoo"></span> === Why Not Arch or Gentoo? === I use Arch Linux now, SuSE from 2002-2004, and Gentoo from 2004-2015. I enjoy making my life difficult for no good reason. In my 30s, I’ve come to realize that I derive sick pleasure from making my life difficult for no good reason; but I wouldn’t recommend that for beginners ''(or anyone)''. With Ubuntu, you get a system that’s easy to set up and maintain without the extra hassle, designed to be as idiot-proof as possible, and designed for normal humans to use. If you wish to use another distro, '''''GO FOR IT!''''' There is NO one ''“right way”'' to do any of what I am doing here! <span id="installing-with-raid-1-choosing-your-os-drive"></span> === Installing with RAID 1: Choosing Your OS Drive === We are going to be using RAID 1. RAID 1 is a mirroring setup, where we use two drives for the operating system instead of one. This means one of the drives can completely fail and the server continues running. I would suggest that you find not one, but TWO SSDs for this purpose. We will be using <code>MDADM</code> for RAID. Ubuntu allows you to do this upon install without having to edit configuration files. <span id="why-software-raid-using-mdadm-instead-of-hardware-raid-with-a-raid-controller-card"></span> ==== Why software RAID using MDADM instead of hardware RAID with a RAID controller card? ==== RAID controller cards are for people with datacenters that have hundreds of drives and need maximum performance/resilience for specific applications, that want the task of managing these drives separate from the software running the computer. This was also very useful back when machines were powered by Pentium 1 processors. <blockquote>'''NOTE:''' Some hardware RAID controllers will give you improvements in performance, but it’s not worth the downside. There are controllers where when they fail, you have to replace it with the exact same controller for your setup to work again - aka, digiorno all over again. Using software RAID like MDADM means you can take drives out of a pentium 4 and put them into a macbook and it’ll just detect it & work. </blockquote> It is 2024, and even a ten-year-old computer will do software RAID just fine with no perceivable penalty in performance. <span id="why-not-use-raid-built-into-my-motherboard"></span> ==== Why not use RAID built into my motherboard? ==== That is called ''“fake RAID.”'' Fake RAID is cancer. It is not “hardware” RAID, it is just software RAID by another name. When you create a RAID array using the garbage built into your motherboard, the RAID configuration is sometimes stored in a proprietary format that is only readable by that specific manufacturer’s RAID implementation. I used the word ''“sometimes”'' because it depends on your system. I have no idea what system you have. I want ALL of the people reading this to have a system that works if they transfer these drives to another system, not ''“some”'' of you. It costs you nothing to use <code>mdadm</code>, which offers certainty of compatibility when you transfer these drives to other hardware. When certainty & uncertainty have the same price, all other things being equal, I’ll take the certainty! MDADM software RAID is a standardized system that transfers across computers – I am not using hardware RAID, I am not using whatever RAID is in the BIOS of your computer, because I have no idea what they are using or whether it is something standard or something that will be aggravating later. If you have to take these drives and put them in another computer, there will be less hassle using software RAID than there is using hardware RAID, it’s literally plug and play ''(well, you may have to use a liveCD to run <code>grub-install</code> to register the bootloader with the new machine’s UEFI, but… The RAID part will work at least!).'' <span id="drive-recommendation-for-os"></span> ==== Drive recommendation for OS: ==== We’re going to have two drives in RAID 1. '''''You can use more if you like – RAID 1 need not be two drives!''''' I like Micron SSDs; they have always had consistently lower failure rates than Samsung’s budget “EVO” line for me with regards to NVME devices. I’ve RMA’d the same 2 TB Samsung EVO 970 five times now… Five… Times. You can get two budget 4 TB SSDs for under $500 now – I recommend ''[https://www.crucial.com/ssd/p3/CT4000P3SSD8 these]''. We are going to be using these SSDs for virtual machines that perform many tasks. Here are some of the storage-intensive ones: * Self-hosted mail. Your inbox may be 50+ GB like mine. * Complete phone backup of everything – can easily eclipse 2 terabytes. Mine is 1.4. * FreePBX phone system – call recordings over time can go over 50 GB easily. I suggest buying drives for your operating system disk that are considerably fast and have enough space to store all of this. With regards to security camera recordings, and the backup of your 40 terabytes of recipes stored as .mkv files – that, we’ll do on an array of hard drives. You don’t need to get SSDs. <span id="raid-is-not-a-backup"></span>
Summary:
Please note that all contributions to FUTO may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see
FUTO:Copyrights
for details).
Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following hCaptcha:
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)