olomana

The PWS 2.0 redesign, successor to https://github.com/runyanjake/whitney.

About

Background

Whitney was the codename for my first homelab setup (For reference: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/). It was built out of my friend's handmedown hardware in an old server case that was e-wasted from school. This initial build was on the "janky" side, featuring an unmounted power supply in the optical bay, secured only by some green yarn. (Fire hazard, anyone?) [Picture Here] I ran a lot of services from this box - my personal website/online resume, side projects, a Covid-19 data tracker, game servers, and a lot of other projects that taught me lessons in DNS config, networking, maintaining persistent storage and others.
But eventually I started running up against the limits of the box. The machine's CPU was released in 2008, which was indicative of the age of most of its hardware. After spending a lot of work on the original Whitney config in the first repo, I decided that I had learned enough to warrant an upgrade.

The Upgrade

PWS 2.0 was given the nickname of "Olomana", a second step in this pattern of mountainous server names. Mount Olomana (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olomana_(mountain)) is a mountain on the Windward side of Oahu, Hawaii. It has 3 peaks which are are a popular, albeit difficult and dangerous hike. While visiting family in Kailua, I hiked the Ko'olau range and snapped this picture of the rarely seen backside of Mount Olomana.
Olomana, the web server will be a significant upgrade over its predecessor. I am building it as a 4U rack-mounted machine with new components. The 16U rack it is mounted in was sourced from the popular website www.racksolutions.com. The build itself includes a number of current gen budget components. Cricital resources like Ram and CPU cores are more abundant in the new build. I got a UPS and a dedicated write drive that were tested on PWS 1.0 to combat some data corruption issues I had faced on the old hardware. [Picture here]

Setup

Hardware

Hard Drives/Filesystem

Manage disk partitions with gdisk, configure mounts by editing /etc/fstab. See https://techguides.yt/guides/how-to-partition-format-and-auto-mount-disk-on-ubuntu-20-04/
Configure ZFS pool using at least raidz1 for data that should not be lost. Other data can go in drives directly mounted at the root.

Nvidia GPU Setup

Install Nvidia Drivers, see https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-linux/index.html#ubuntu
Resolved issue with old key by following method 2 in this issue: https://github.com/NVIDIA/cuda-repo-management/issues/4
Install nvidia-docker, see https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/cloud-native/container-toolkit/install-guide.html#docker

Software

OpenSSH

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

Port forward port 22 on the gateway.

sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw allow 22
sudo ufw reload

Github CLI

Install gh CLI tool.

sudo apt-get install gh

Generate new SSH key to upload to Github if you'll be pushing or downloading private repos.

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"

Edit ~/.ssh/config so the key is used.

Host github.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Make sure the key is added to github before doing anything else.
You will likely need to make a Personal Access Token upload key. It must have the following permissions.

workflow
admin::public_key
read::org

Authenticate with the CLI:

gh auth login

Clone this repo

gh repo clone runyanjake/olomana

Docker

See https://linuxiac.com/how-to-install-docker-on-ubuntu-24-04-lts/

sudo apt install apt-transport-https curl
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt update
sudo apt install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin
sudo systemctl is-active docker

Misc

Set System Time

timedatectl list-timezones
sudo timedatectl set-timezone America/Los_Angeles