Linux servers

We have two servers that are hosted by TransIP. These servers are sponsored, so we can use them for for "free".

Server 1 - Website and Git

Server one is the longest operational server with the most important role to serve our website https://engineersofinnovation.nl. Apart from serving the main website we also have an Gitlab server running.

https://gitlab.com is a DevOps tool that provides things like Git and other tools. We host our own, so we don't have to pay for subscriptions, but what comes with some limitations, but so far it has been sufficient.

nginx is used to serve the website (wordpress site) together with PHP and MariaDB. nginx is also used to forward the communication to gitlab-ce.

files for our website are stored in /var/www/engineersofinnovation.nl Currently on this server we also have the MQTT broker and a small MQTT websocket dashboard, the plan is to move this to Server 2.

Server 2 - Live data and sandbox

We want to make server two a server we can use during races and host our applications to do fancy calculations and predictions.

Currently only a docker installation is installed with our new Wiki, this was more a test but seems to work quite nicely (if you ask me). The plan is to move this trivial information source to a more stable production server (server 1). This way we have all the operational stuff on one server, so some live data program will not influence our normal operations on our website.

Technicalities

Both virtual private servers are hosted at TransIP, but don't have the same "hardware".

Server 1

• 2 cores
• 4 GB RAM
• 150 GB Storage

Server 2

• 4 cores
• 8 GB RAM
• 300 GB Storage

Suggested way forward

Server configuration

• move wiki to server 1
• swap "hardware" servers
• setup server 2 for live data

problem with swapping the "hardware" is that the IP addresses will change so DNS servers need to be updated. This can cause a few hours of outage, but can be done wen our servers are least used.

Other options is just to leave it as is, with the consequence of running out of mainly RAM (currently using 75%) on server 1.

Other option is to ask TransIP for more powerful hardware on Server 1

Backups

TransIP will also make backups of our servers, but we need to write down and imporve how we currently do this.