School Setup

Plain Text

In my freshman year, after suffering through much impostor syndrome, I finally discovered the power of markup languages with the help of the Open Source cult.

These days, I use markdown (pandoc my beloved) for notes and essays and LaTeX for anything more complicated. For LaTeX work, I use a class that I hacked together. To build and generate projects for each assignment, I use TeXbld.

Servers

Due to the peculiarities of my workflow, I hacked together a custom synchronization and backup system. The future of this setup given my looming move to Cambridge is yet to be decided.

The main storage system involves three servers following the 3-2-1 backup rule. In my house is a Raspberry Pi (which I won from a programming competition) and a 14-year-old Dell workstation that I revived with FreeBSD. Outside my house, I have a VPS instance from DigitalOcean.

All three servers sync my schoolwork with each other through syncthing and create backups every 6 hours with cron and a script that looks something like below:

#!/bin/sh
cd /srv/nfs
ls | sort -n | head -n 30 | xargs -r rm -rf
mkdir -p /srv/nfs/backups/archives
tar -czvf /srv/nfs/backups/archives/$(date +%s).tar.gz ohsg12

I can freely edit all my schoolwork on the Raspberry Pi by mounting it on whatever computer I happen to have through either an nfs or samba mount. The DigitalOcean droplet can be accessed through samba, although it is password protected.