First off, I any of you have been waiting for me to get around to publishing parts 2 & 3 of my SnapCast series, I apologize for the delay. I’ve finally got my homelab to a state where I can start transitioning my wife over from some of the cloud services we’ve been using to my self-hosted alternatives. The final push on that was to get backups working properly. Anyways, time just disappeared on me.
So here’s those two articles:
I’ve had a whole bunch of infrastructure type articles in progress for months now. I finally took the time to wrap a bunch of them up. Part of the issue is that so much of the content is inter-related that it feels wrong to publish a single article when a whole bunch of the information depends on understanding some other concept that is covered in a different article that hasn’t been completed yet.
What am I trying to accomplish here?
As someone who has always considered himself primarily a programmer, I’ve also had to be “The IT Guy” for decades, and also “The Unix Guy”. This meant that I ended up with a lot of practical experience with networking and data centre configuration and planning. I was in charge of configuring the rulebase on a CheckPoint FW1 firewall before some of you were born.
At the same, I never really wanted to do this stuff, but somebody had to, and it had to be done right. But it was all “hands-on”, and I would have killed myself before I’d go through the misery of getting something like a Cisco certification.
On top of that, as a programmer I was quite a bit more involved with the business of the company than any of the networking guys we eventually ended hiring. This meant that my role morphed into being the guy that could help the network techies understand how their plumbing was going to be used by the business.
I look at what it takes me to build a homelab, and I realize just how much I lean on the things I learned over decades of being “The IT Guy”, and I wonder how hard it must be for people without that kind of a background.
I’ve read through much of the FUTO article, and i can only think that even that is a hard slog for non-technical beginners. I thought that if I could share some of the things that I’ve learned about putting together a homelab over the past year or so, while trying to explain the underlying concepts involved, then it might help someone…and it keeps me busy and off the streets.
Back to the article dump…
Next is an article about DNS servers and, specifically, Technitium.
Going hand-in-hand with that, is an article about how You Need a Public Domain.
Finally, an article I’ve been sitting on forever that talks about the Lenovo M910Q Servers that I have been using in my Proxmox cluster.
In case you’re interested, I’m also working on articles about systemd, a Proxmox introduction, resilency and recovery, network security, accessing services, VPN integration and linux basics.
As always, I’m interested in any feedback you may have, including stuff I got wrong or missed out, and whether there’s any content you’d like to see. Thx.
Yeah, there is a line of units that has a PCI slot that then requires a riser card in order to be able to use it. The problem is that those units, from what I’ve seen, tend to cost at least twice as much as the M910Q/M710Q. Even the M920Q/M720Q are significantly more expensive. Not to mention, a bit more difficult to get hold of.
IMHO, once you’re talking about dropping $300-$350 on one of these models with the riser card, you really have to think hard about whether it’s worth it for 6th/7th generation Core i5 processors. Especially if you’re looking at a cluster of three. It seems highly probable that you could get something with an 11th/12th generation processor and multiple or 2.5GB ethernet ports for only a bit more, and you’d end up only needing two of them instead of three, and price might end up being a wash.
I am really, really curious to see how external USB 2.5GB or 5GB adapters would work. I’m getting the impression that they are a lot more reliable than they were even a few years ago, and might be a viable, cheap option.
All that being said, network speed hasn’t been an issue for me so far, and I’m not convinced that CEPH + HA, is a path I should be going down. Or a path that’s worth it for most self-hosters.
So far, the only thing that I’ve encountered that pushes the CPU on an ongoing basis is Frigate, and even that is performing well and not affecting other containers on the same host. But I’m still adding services to my cluster, so who knows.