With the need to increase the flexibility of operations of TECTRA Ltd by enabling secure and speedy access to and work on/with information from outside the office, while maintaining the company’s minimal independence on paid third-party services, I revamped the company’s IT infrastructure and software landscape to enable remote and more-efficient work through the use of the following hardware, software and tools:

Infrastructure and access

  • Configured, procured, built, installed and administered (with ultra-low monthly effort) three low-powered, Celeron-based servers for three locations (one main, two “satellites”), with Debian 10/11/12 and Proxmox VE
  • Servers at 3 different locations for local access speeds, redundancy, and off-site backups
  • Replaced old and power-hungry client PCs with low-powered and capable refurbished Lenovo desktops (ThinkCentre SFF and Tiny) and laptops (Thinkpad X220/X230/T420/T430)
  • Wireguard VPN enabling secure access to the intranet from anywhere, including from smartphone
  • External-facing services reverse-proxied by NGINX to internal KVM VMs via the Yggdrasil iPv6 mesh network

Services

  • Google Workspace emails downloaded locally with fetchmail, processed with procmail into separate mailboxes, filtered with spamassassin, served by courier-imap, and accessed via Thunderbird or Roundcube ; email sending from different email identities (accounting@..., sales@...) through an exim4 SMTP relay to Google’s servers
  • File serving to Windows and Linux laptops and desktops via Samba , with antivirus-scanning by ClamAV
  • DNS-based ad and malware filtering using Pi-hole with ESNI through unbound to OpenDNS and Cloudflare DNS servers
  • Company calendars and contacts using Radicale for CalDAV and CardDAV and Thunderbird’s Lightning and CardBook extensions
  • Prosody server for internal messaging with XMPP
  • Tracking of progress from sales inquiry to invoice settlement using kanban on WeKan
  • Sharing of product and offer documentation with customers thanks to filebrowser on files.tectra.gr instead of Dropbox

Security and backups

  • Redundancy and distribution of some datasets/directories through a GlusterFS cluster with 5 replicas across 3 locations
  • Incremental syncronization between the main and the satellite servers using Unison
  • Automated incremental, off-site backups using borgbackup
  • Automated notifications of events using ntfy.sh and a Telegram bot

Other

OVERBRING project
IT infrastructure and software landscape revamp
2020
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