System Administration

What is a system though?

Yes, this word can be confusing and even frustrating sometimes. Merriam-Webster Dictionary classifies it as "a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole", so a system is any group of things that become a part of something else. In other words, I could be talking about solar system, respiratory system, aerospace system, or any other type of system and it would still be valid. But for some reason, it is taking as a convention that when you add the word Administration right after Systems it meams Systems related to computers, servers, network and all of these other things that stand as the base of the internet as we know today.

Also I wanted to make this tab separated from Cloud so here I can focus more on on-premises, self-hosted stuff or network basics.

My server

One day I was studying for one of my college classes and I came to know what was rack server, and in that moment I was flabbergasted. So much power, so much redundancy, so much safety to actually hold your data without any billionaire stealing it. After that moment I put as a goal to buy myself a server like that. It took some time, and months worth of my internship salary, but I could get one of these beautiful things for my house.

Dell PowerEdge 730xd

This big boy is my main server. Right now I have a cabinet to protect it, but it was a struggle to find a cabinet that fits these models, that's why by the time of this picture it was still like that.

My current configuration is:

• CPU:
• RAM: 128GB (LRDIMM DDR4 64GB x 2) Bought it before AI ate all our RAM
• Storage: ~7TB but only 4TB usable due to RAID redundancy
• GPU: ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3050 8GB

And a bunch of VMs in Proxmox.

Networks

I am still not very sure of what else I should add to this part, but I want to share a spreadsheet I made to help calculating IP Address subnetting.

This without a guide might not be much of a help, in the future I will probably add a quick guide as well.