TendieDex, Additional Hardware, Failovers

I finally made that website I kept promising everyone I'd eventually make!

TendieDex is an "index" of chicken available at various stores and restaurants rated from best to worst.

I decided to get another ec200a, figured it was time to expand!

And finally, with the addition of another server, I also added a redundant DC.

TendieDex

I've had this "forever affinity" for chicken tenders since I got to choose what I ate.

Not sure what drives it, but I get them almost everywhere I go. After several of my friends started to notice this trend, they suggested building a "chicken tender rating website" to rate chicken tenders from various restaurants and stores.

I pondered on the idea for a while, my mom suggested doing YouTube videos on the subject, but that's not really my thing. I'm a text-on-the-screen kind of guy.

Couple of months go by, and I return to the subject after a friend brings it up again while I was visiting him in Chicago, and I finally decide "let's do this" and start strategizing my approach.

First off, we need a domain, something humoring, something easy to remember, nothing too long. I thought of "mytenders" or "onlytenders" but I'd already done that with another gag site of mine OnlySheps.com which was also a treat to build.

I ended up settling with TendieDex.com and purchased TendieDex.net just to be on the safe side. Wouldn't want anyone stealing my thunder, right?

Then, I had to decide what kind of site-design I wanted. I wanted something basic. Something you could just open-up, read, scan for what you want, and then find your answer in a matter of seconds.

The framework I ended up going with really exemplifies that, skeleton doesn't have any flashy CSS or material design elements. It's simply text on a screen. That's it.

After that, the hard part comes into play, remembering all the various restaurants and store-bought chicken I've ever eaten, and how I remember each and every one of them.

I sorted that data into 4 categories, flavor, size, breading, and individuality.

Each brand / store was rated on those categorical qualities and rated on a top-bottom scale, measuring best-worst.

I decided about half-way through that I'd also sub-categorize by type that way I wasn't rating frozen chicken on the same scale as restaurant chicken. Just didn't seem fair to certain restaurants.

Finally, I needed a logo. I'm lazy, so the first thing I thought of was the Chicken Emoji 🐔 seems simple enough, and gets the point across.

And voila, TendieDex was born.

After wrapping up the design, information and other tid-bits, I was able to commit the final touches to Github and build the site using Cloudflare Pages.

Additional Hardware

Not as exciting as a chicken tenders website, but still pretty cool. I was able to make another deal with the vendor I purchased my first ec200a from.

He shipped it out pretty quick, and after waiting a week-or-so for the RAM and NVMe SSD I put it together and span it up.

Of course it came with factory firmware on the BIOS, iLO, and etc. Had to find my upgrade ISO again and run that. This one also didn't come with iLO licensing so I had to buy that as well.

The next issue I was presented with was that my NAS only has 2 ports, and one was going out to my switch, and the other was serving as a DAS to my first ec200a.

Knowing that I had that second link setup as a /30, I switched it to a /29 and put in a switch between it and the ec200a. Thus, adding additional ports to serve additional hosts.

After that was out of the way, I also had to figure out how to cluster the Proxmox hosts together so that I didn't have conflicting VM Storage folders on my NFS share. Without them being clustered, one server could create a folder named "101" and the other could do the same and potentially overwrite the first one's data.

By clustering, they both speak to one-another and number VMs accordingly, as well as provide a centralized VM management interface.

Finally, everything was good-to-go! Nice and neat!

Failover DC

Now that I had some additional hardware, I figured it was time to spin-up an additional domain controller in the lab.

It'd serve several purposes, failover AD DS as well as failover DNS. I try to keep my Windows Server VMs as up to date as possible to avoid security issues.

I had to recollect my college course on Windows Server and how to setup a failover DC, but after taking a gander at the book and doing some googling I was able to get it setup pretty quickly.

I also made sure to install DUO on it, as I like to secure my DCs with 2FA whenever possible.

And that's about it! I'm working on some other larger projects, but they've been on the back-burner with how busy life has been lately. Hopefully, I'll have something fun to share mid-month, or early March.

You'll just have to wait and see! 👀