What is a server?

This blog and video aim to introduce and explain servers.

From 1 GB of RAM to 3 TB of RAM, there is a slew of servers for a wide variety of usage cases. I try to break it down by the services running on any given box, explain a little bit of the hardware differences and then go into more depth using the open source operating system, FreeNAS, as an example of a home server. 

I know a lot of concepts covered in the video weren't covered before, and per your interest those could be critical or just details. I'm linking some more information about the concepts covered below.

Off-the-bat - the FreeNAS instance I'm running is not production/persistent. If you want to install and setup FreeNAS be sure to follow the recommended hardware specifications from iXsystems.

https://www.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/

More information about the technologies discussed are below.

RAID - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

ZFS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS & https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs.html

User groups - https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/users-synopsis.html

  -  I talk more about this in the below video as well

Virtual machines (VMs) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine

  -  Very general here I'll try to cover the topic more in depth in a future video

Containers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_namespaces & https://www.docker.com/

Jails - https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/jails.html

Remember, while there is always more to know, most of the basics just build upon one another. Day-by-day, week-by-week, you will gradually learn the importance and competence of all these details. It takes time.

Essentially there is a multitude of ways to split up tasks and data running on a server, and also share said data between devices. FreeNAS offers a nice UI for interacting and setting up common services that have immediate value for home / small office users. Its services can help with data backup, file sharing, redundancy, cloud sync, and, with plugins and jails, has the ability to add more services as needed. 

One more video I hope to share is a short one. In the first video, I used the most open way to create a share on FreeNAS 11.3. However, a better practice is to ensure a specific user is set to the owner of that share, and then let users login using that account name and password.

Networking introduction

This video is a quick introduction about networking on computers. It covers some high-level concepts, such as packets, TCP/IP, IP addresses, DNS, DHCP, as well as some useful commands. Again since this is a Linux based video a lot of the commands are shown using Linux, though Windows equivalents (ipconfig, arp -a, and ping) are also covered.

This is truly just an introduction of key concepts, and omits more complex topics of setting static IPs, bringing up a network on a Linux server, and complex routing or detailed firewall permissions, etc. These are all important for IT administrator work and I am linking some more useful links below. 

References:

• Netmask and subnet tables: https://dnsmadeeasy.com/support/subnet/ This was actually somewhat glossed over in the recording, as the Gateway address - typically that of the router on the LAN would define the first 3 groups of numbers and the Netmask controls what level of variance is possible. For example - Gateway 192.168.1.1 and Netmask 255.255.255.0 means other IPs of 192.168.1.XXX (where XXX is 2~254) are valid, where Gateway 192.168.1.1 and Netmask 255.255.254.0 means other IPs of 192.168.1.XXX and 192.168.2.XXX are valid.
• Microsoft also has a pretty good description of the concept as well: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/164015/understanding-tcp-ip-addressing-and-subnetting-basics
• More info on TCP/IP: https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/TCP-IP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite https://www.javatpoint.com/computer-network-tcp-ip-model
• Firewall setting details - using ufw on Ubuntu / Linux Mint: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-firewall-with-ufw-on-ubuntu-18-04
• Firewalld (Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora):
  https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-firewall-using-firewalld-on-centos-7
• Firewall rules in Windows 10 (note that the defaults for this are enabled with Windows Defender in the settings):
  https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-to-open-firewall-ports-in-windows-10,36451.html

Networking is an important part of using computers and tech, and having a basic understanding is really critical to starting on more advanced projects. Like with the other concepts covered in this blog, I hope this is a good starting point.