Documenting my server
Not long ago I realized that I could get $50 of credit on Digital Ocean with my GitHub Student account, so I decided to try it. I transferred my website there, and with time I started adding services. It is currently running the following services:
- My webpage (oscarbenedito.com).
- Redirections from www.oscarbenedito.com, obenedito.org and www.obenedito.org to oscarbenedito.com.
- A Gotify server through which I am able to send notifications to my phone.
- A static page showing traffic on my website thanks to GoAccess (which analyzes Apache's log files).
- It runs this script daily to back up all my git repositories and others I find interesting.
- It notifies me if any new documents are uploaded to my college Moodle using this script and a cronjob.
- It notifies me every time someone logs in to the server using SSH.
As time passes I am adding more and more features to my server. In the first place because it is fun to learn about different things and installing them, but also because they are useful features (indeed I have tried to run other programs which ended up not being as useful as I initially thought). I realized it is getting to the point where if something was to happen to my server (and it got erased), I would probably not remember how I set up everything, so I decided to do some documentation work1.
After some time, I am nearly done documenting everything that is set up and I am pretty confident if I had to do it all again now, the documentation would be very useful. Besides, it is also a good way of keeping a record of everything running in the server and its configuration.
- I know that taking snapshots of the server or making a backup every once in a while would solve that issue. However, that wasn't the only goal. I wanted to be able to rebuild my server from scratch again. ↩
