I haven’t really talked about the backend infrastructure for Blinkenshell in a long time, so I thought I would give an update on the servers/VMs that are currently running as of now. Most people probably think it’s just a shell server and that’s it, but in reality there’s almost 25 different VMs involved in running Blinkenshell!
- Triton (SSH)
- Buildserver
- Web server backend
- Web server front/cache
- Database replication slave
- Mail server
- /home storage server
- Blinkenbot and signup utils
- 2x IRC servers
- ACME
- Nagios monitoring server
- Telegraf/Grafana monitoring server
- Log server
- Off-site backup
- 3x LDAP
- Tunnel server IPv4
- Tunnel server IPv6
- 3x Firewall
Why so many? The most important reason here is mostly security again, to try and isolate different parts from each other as much as possible by running on different VMs with firewalls in between. It’s also a lot more flexible when making upgrades/changes to only take down one part at a time. But still, is 25 VMs really required? Probably not, but I like labbing and testing out some different things! There’s actually even more VMs than the ones listed above but they’re not required to run the service but more of lab/test things.
I posted a teaser picture of KVM server 1 on IRC, this is server 2, almost exactly the same!
If you want to help support the running costs of Blinkenshell please consider supporting via Paypal or Patreon 🙂 Any anything you want to see/know more about? Let me know!
