Blog - MattBits

Goals I started off with a basic goal - host a small python website, which uses a MySQL-like database on a highly available cluster. After recently moving from a rack in a datacenter (and fortunately saving ~£250/month), I started looking at hosting some web applications on VPSs from a couple of providers. Of course, this means: Every instance costs money - I can no longer spin up 10 extra VMs because the hardware is already running… each instance costs.

Tinc appears to be one of the few open source mesh VPNs and, in my expierience, once working, performs incredible well. That said, the configuration of tinc is a little clunky and repetitive, nor does their documentation give much of a clue as to what is required for a minimal setup. Example The following example will connect 4 machines in a tinc mesh network; one machine has a direct internet connection (and have public IP addresses); two are behind a NAT gateway, with tinc ports being fowarded to one of the nodes; one machine is behind a different NAT gateway, again, unable to forward ports.

🧾 1. INFRASTRUCTURE EVOLUTION TIMELINE (HIGH LEVEL) Era Approx timeframe Key characteristics Core systems Early server era (pre-~2007 → unknown) First exposure to servers, NT domain Compaq Windows NT server Early homelab / ESX era ~2007–2013 Physical servers, early virtualization (RAM constrained) DL380 G3 (x3), DL360 G3, ESX/vCenter, Whitebox NAS Expansion / distributed experimentation ~2012–2016 Multi-server lab, PXE booting experiments, Jenkins (sheila) x3455 servers, DL160 G6 (later), fileserver VPS High-Availability Era ~2018 Multi-provider VPS cluster, Mesh VPN, HA MariaDB Tinc, OpenVPN, Docker Swarm, HAProxy Identity foundation era ~2016 First stable Linux identity system FreeIPA (marge/homer) Datacentre / colo era ~2017 Formal cluster + SAN deployment DL160 G6 cluster, Nexsan SAN Consolidation era ~2018–2019 VM consolidation + modern CI/IAM R720xd, Synology, Keycloak Platform orchestration era ~2019–2024 Container orchestration, Rancher, early automation GitLab (Rancher), Jenkins systems Modern orchestration era ~2024–2026 Nomad-based unified service plane Nomad, Consul, Vault, Keycloak migration 🧾 1.