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Crea ... what ?

   

Maybe you did not even bother to take a look at the URL but you are now looking at an URL into the domain of creamen.net.
I bought this domain late of 2001 as a project I wanted to develop with a friend I meet at Jussieu … and then did not do a lot of it during the last two decades - which are not yet finished but the end is close …
I am using it as my main email address since then, so I had to setup a bunch of stuff to make it alive and hosted it directly on internet on a permanent connection. I costed us - and then me - a lot at this time as we were using a dedicated machine - more precisely 2U machines in co-located 42U bay first in Paris and then Redbus in Courbevoie via Absolight running FreeBSD but my last attempt to get a powerful machine at low cost lead me to unreliable situation and lots of stress so I switched to a Dedibox late of the ‘2000, using Linux … So I hosted during these years my stuff on those - first owned and dedicated then co-rented only - machines.
The first one was thanos, a Dell 2540 : Dual Pentium III 1GHz with 256MB of memory and 4x16GB of SCSI 10k RPM in RAID1. Damn gorgeous for that time, we made an upgrade for RAM to 1GB in 4x256MB ECC SD133MHz !!! An amazing machine working quite fine with the FreeBSD. Main issue was disk space. 32GB is cool but logs take place, and also I used it to host website with graphical contents so … I ended to upgrade the whole hardware and bought a new 2U server. I don’t remember the exact spec. I remember I bought it on feu Sunwizards but the boost was huge. From Pentium III to Pentium X5000 with 8GB or 16GB of memory and maybe 148GB of hardisk - still SCSI as far I remember but 15k this time - it was a monster that a broker sold as is : missing part, enclosing in bad shape and plastics broken but the whole booted and worked well after some fixups - under FreeBSD also. Sadly, I have to confess that this machine did not survive a lot. The fault to something I was unable to find but I had reboot under heavy load and worse, freeze with no way to reboot it without assistance …
I found another setup on SMPFr : Dual Opteron quad-core with 32GB of RAM and plenty of disk space on SAS. After change things got even worse. Machine rebooted randomly. I suspected FreeBSD so I switched to Linux ( … ) but with no luck. Something was fucked up and did not had the time to investigate. So I finally decided to get rid of the owned machine solution and rented a machine at Dedibox ( now Online.fr ) and since then I am quite happy with them. Machine is up, network/bandwith is ok, Linux Ubuntu is ok too and I have plenty of disk space for my mails and websites I am hosting.

So what is by the end creamen : an aborted project to host art / music or what ever related to cultural things.
Initially, I was using a FreeBSD / Apache / PHP / MySQL/PgSQL stack for Web, with Postfix for email and Bind9 for DNS, ProFTPd for FTP file sharing and OpenLDAP for virtual hosting ( both Web / FTP / email ). More than 17 years later, FreeBSD is no more my OS, I switched to Ubuntu and now Archlinux. I am still using Apache/PHP/MySQL ( PgSQL was never really used ), Bind9, Postfix and OpenLDAP. I am still running ProFTPd but its use is legacy. Direct DL via HTTP is now the rule. My last migration - in 2015 - leaded me to do some slight changes. I introduced the use of Docker to put my LAMP stack into containers and link them ( not yet with Compose tbh ) and I “secure” the clear text protocol via TLS and the use of Let’s Encrypt certificates. The LAMP stack is now behind a NGinx reverse proxy which is acting as a SSL terminator : as everything else is bind on docker interface on the same host, I did not configure my own CA to encrypt this traffic ( yet ? ). I setup a OwnCloud to handle my calendar, address-book, file sharing. … I also have a PeerTube but I have to upgrade to last version - it was alpha when I tried it - and as it’s a node app, I am more and more reluctant … I have also a Let’s Chat server mainly used … for nothing but alive :) I may have to give a - ‘n another - try to MatterMost but build and setup was painful … but it could be useful for my next project ( I will write a topic on that when things will be more clear :) ) !
I am still hosting my git project via cGit - I’ll may post something about it because it is not as straight forward as it seems if you want more than a git clone stuff !

So now I used it for multipurpose personal stuff :

  • email / webmail
  • calendar, address-book, file-sharing
  • IRC gateway
  • Webhosting ( Riffgauche is the last external one I am hosting, the rest is personal non critical stuff … )

List of technologies used or still in use :

  • FreeBSD †
  • Linux
  • Apache 2.2 † / 2.4
  • PHP 5.x / 7.0
  • MySQL 5.x
  • PostgreSQL 8.x † / 9.x
  • NGinx 1.5
  • Postfix
  • Bind9
  • ProFTPd ½ †
  • Docker ( with FROM alpine:3.x whenever it’s possible ! )
  • TLS 1.3 experimentation via NGinx

Nothing really disruptive but I am ok with that :D … So Creamen will be alive as a personal way to handle my day to day stuff and my try to get rid of Google-we-spy-on-you-and consort. I don’t need the extra feature of Github and cGit is enough for me. I have a Trac instance running for my remind-me-you-have-something-to-fix-one-day list. For sure that does not scale for a team but it’s not my goal so … everything is fine for me … for now !

LLAP - David-san !