A while back, I upgraded my main home server to Red Hat 9. Unfortunately, the upgrade failed to boot due to deprecated hardware. Bummer. I attempted the usual workaround to get RHEL to recognize my RAID setup, but no luck this time—so I decided to start fresh with Fedora, a KEMP load balancer, and Cloudflare.
Rebuilding My Home Lab Server with Fedora
I opted for Fedora Server, along with a KEMP Load Balancer and Cloudflare DNS and SSL. After installing Fedora, I quickly restored my container environment and moved many containers over to my Synology NAS. Now, both servers share the container load. I also brought the virtual machines back online, but for some reason, the web server wouldn’t cooperate. With other things demanding my time (and not much blogging happening), I put it on hold.
More recently, I spun up a new web server for a photography business I’m launching. I built and deployed a new virtual machine in no time. While working on web projects, I figured it was the right moment to revive this blog. The original server was toast, but fortunately, I had a backup of the WordPress site and its database. I stood up a fresh virtual machine, installed WordPress, and restored all the data.
That left me with two web servers, both using port 443 and pointing to the same public IP—obviously not ideal. To resolve that, I deployed a KEMP Load Balancer, configured SSL with Cloudflare using Edge and Origin certificates, and created virtual server rules to route traffic to the right machine.
Dual Web Servers and Load Balancing in My Home Lab Setup
Now both web servers are running smoothly on my network. With The Root User back online, I’m ready to share new articles—mainly focused on Cloud Computing and Network Security, my current areas of deep dive. These days I’m working with Oracle Gov Cloud and Azure, so expect more content around both platforms.
Stay tuned!
