[bitfolk] Re: Home server

Starting with my first ADSL back in 2001 I ran my own mail server at home at first with qmail on a SparcStation-1 and I think later on with postfix on an SGI Indigo2 and when I stopped using the SGI as a workstation in around 2004 I moved email onto an NSLU2 to save electricity (using two USB sticks for storage). My motivation for using the NSLU2 was really just that it felt cool to use something so small. At first it was all good; but as time progressed it was taking more and more time and effort to ensure that emails could be received, constant attack from the spammers trying to relay. This meant frequently having to update and fix, sometimes trying to figure out what they were doing to relay spam. Sometimes they'd find a way (e.g. the bounce messages) and my bandwidth would suffer *and* sometimes I'd get blacklisted. I think I also had my all of websites hosted on the same SparcStation - really because my home IP was dynamic but never changed and back in 2001 it really wasn't possible to afford a real host in a datacenter. My first VPS was in 2008 then I moved everything onto that. Probably in around 2011 it was becoming too much hassle to maintain my own mail server and I came to the conclusion that it just wasn't worth it and moved everything onto the (then free) GoogleApps. I think the last thing that I had running at home was my SVN server - but that went offline when I was a long way away and realised that it would be better to move to git. However having said all of that I'd probably consider trying it again; Linux has improved a lot particularly when it comes to package management.