This year, a company upgraded their server and gave the old ones to our university, which ended up being used by our classes to train on networking and on services deployment.

We thought about how we could connect them. One was going to be our main docker server to install service such as an LDAP server, a Nextcloud, a Forgejo, a Matrix server, a Nginx to link everything and some other niche service such as a Satisfactory and Minecraft server.

Another server was installed with Proxmox to allow easily creating a temporary Virtual Machine with maximum performance, which was really helpful for some of our university projects.

They were all configured in RAID 5 to make sure our data would last in case of failure.

It was pretty fun to set everything up and see it work perfectly. We even bought a domain name to make it easily accessible. Since the university network is not public, we found a technique that we called “reverse VPN”, consisting of connecting the machine to one of our own VPN (often directly possible from our home boxes) and expose its Nginx ports as our own.

This worked perfectly for the whole year and allowed us to enjoy the computing power of those machines anywhere, to study, to share files with another student or teachers.

I ended up doing the same at home to store all my files, no more “you are limited to 15GB of storage, please buy the premium grade,” I bought 2 hard drives and voilà! I now have 1TB of storage wherever I want (expect when there is a power cut, but that’s another story).