Welcome!


Cycling

Thank you for visiting my page. My name is Abhishek Pai, one of my hobbies is to experiment with tech aside from cycling or bouldering on-occasion. I have the privilege of working in the tech indsutry initially starting off as a Software Engineer but more recently moving towards IAM, SysAdmin and DevOps roles.


My Resume, GitHub and other resources are linked above so feel free to browse the code related to both my website and deployment on my home server. This website as well as my deployment will evolve over time as I experiment, learn and improve my skills.


Server Infrastructure

Franklin

Over the years I have started working on creating home server with the help of two Raspberry Pi's (3B & 4B+). The first raspberry pi was called Franklin. This handles the ingress into my home network via the WireGuard VPN or HTTPS. I recently started hosting this website on Franklin along with Traefik to reverse proxy to authentcation and other services I wish to access on my personal cloud.


Eleanor

Inaddition I have a second Raspberry Pi that handles the NAS component of my home server setup called Eleanor. Over the years I have accummulated a large array of photos which I have been storing in external HDDs laying around my desk. I bought a RockPi-SATA HAT with NFS Server configured along with NextCloud deployed on Docker. I was on my way to self-hosting my photos. I have regular cronjobs to backup everything onto GCP buckets to ensure I have some redundancy incase of catastrophic issue occurs with my setup.


Future Plans

The plan is to create a much more robust single server with 5-8 HDDs setup in RAID 5/6 along with a more powerful CPU to handle the containers that I am running on a single machine. Raspberry Pi's are incredible as gateway into experimenting and playing with technology. I have been able to create a self sustaining home server which has taught me a lot but I having a stable platform becomes more important when hosting a larger array of applications.


Moreover I would like to expand my capabilities to backup photos for my family rather than using Google Photos for all the memories they have accummulated over the years. This requires hardware that can accomodate expandability of CPU, RAM, HDD, Network capacity and more.