Homelab - Additional configuration

Assign a fixed IP

Once the server is ready, we need to assign a fixed IP to the server, as the router assigns IP addresses dynamically to connected devices, and we do not want to have a dynamic IP address to the server. So, we tell the router to allocate a fixed IP to the server by adding an Address Reservation entry in the router’s DHCP Server settings. This will map the MAC address of the server to a fixed IP. I have assigned 192.168.0.153.

DHCP address reservation

Move Docker Volume

I moved my Docker volume to the data partition (/mnt/data) to accommodate the increasing size of the volumes.

Stop the Docker service
```
sudo systemctl stop docker
```
Create/Edit the /etc/docker/daemon.json configuration file with the location of the new data directory
```
 { 
     "data-root": "/mnt/data/docker"
 }
```
[Optional] I also added this DNS entry to fix some issues with network unreachable errors for some containers while installing
```
"dns": ["192.168.0.1", "8.8.8.8", "8.8.4.4"]
```
This entry can also be added individually to a particular container. Adding here makes the default for all containers.
Move the existing volumes’ data to the new folder
```
rsync -aP /var/lib/docker/ /mnt/data/docker/
```
To be safe, instead of deleting the old volume data, we will rename it
```
mv /var/lib/docker /var/lib/docker.bak
```
Start Docker service
```
sudo systemctl start docker
```
Once done, we can verify by checking other containers or running this hello world command
```
docker run --rm hello-world
```
If no errors, the volume move is complete, and we can safely delete the old Docker directory
```
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/docker.bak
```

Automount drives

By default, Linux does not automount external drives. We can run mount command to manually mount a disk. To automate the mounting every time the system reboots, we need to add entries to the /etc/fstab file.

Get the UUID
```
lsblk -f
```
This will show all drives, including the unmounted ones.
Grab the UUID of the drive (A12B-8FFC) and make an entry to fstab. Open the fstab file
```
sudo vim /etc/fstab
```
Create the mount directory where the drive will be mounted
```
mkdir /mnt/extern-hdd1
```
Add this line at the end of the file
```
UUID=A12B-8FFC /mnt/extern-hdd1 ext4 defaults,nofail,x-systemd.device-timeout=10s,x-systemd.automount 0 2
```
See fstab documentation for fstab options. The option x-systemd.automount is used to mount the drive on boot.
Repeat this process for other external drives.
Mount all drives in fstab
```
sudo mount -a
```