After turning in my final grades ten days ago, I have essentially been working on my homelab. As the Archer A7 seemed to be dying, I decided to do some upgrades to the network, but somehow that small, simple task turned into a full homelab revamp. That means I replaced not only the Archer A7 with a Protectli VP2420, but for mini computers with one big boy: a Dell Precision T7910. I bought the latter pretty bare-bone and added 128GM RAM, a 10G NIC, a 4xNVMe PCIe card (2x2TB and 2x1TB), a Tough Armor Icy Dock 4x2.5 SAS/SATA HDD/SSD Mobile Rack Enclosure (2x2TB so far), 2x4TB HHDs that I had sitting around, and an SATA Hard Drive Caddy for a small boot SSD to replace the optical drive. I wish I could report that this process was fun and smooth, but I would be lying.
I could go into brain-bleeding detail, but suffice it to say that if it could have gone wrong, it did. About half-way through the process, when I went to bed thinking the lab was purring along, only to awake the next morning to find my cluster broken and irrecoverable—I nearly broke down. I pretty much had to start over, but at least I had some backups.
Add to that the complication of replacing my router running OpenWRT with a new one running pfSense, and I’ve had tricky network issues to solve all through the process. Seriously, using different VLANs introduces more security and order into the network, but also a host of problems I’ve never had to deal with before. Some, like how to access my media library via Plex across VLANs, I still haven’t figured out. That said, the services I have set up, maybe about a dozen, I feel pretty good about. I have much more to do, but—alas!—I have to prep for the summer term that starts next Wednesday.
And I still have my upgraded Power Mac, 5x2TB HDDs, a 10G NIC, 48GB RAM, and a 500MB boot SSD, ready to become a Proxmox backup server. I was going to do another cluster and use Ceph across machines, but my rough time of it dissuaded me for that goal. This time. I’m not sure when I’ll get to this little project, not to mention the short stack of equipment (both mine and Giles’) that I need to sell.
After this Sisyphean journey, I have learned quite a bit about Linux in general and Proxmox and pfSense, specifically. But, tweaking my homelab is supposed to be fun, and these last couple of days have decidedly not been. Course prep will be a short distraction.
Speaking of upgrades: the sound shed is really coming along. The drywall has been delivered to be installed on Monday. That will leave the brick to do, then the finishing touches. I’m as excited as a my boys are on Xmas morning. Here are two recent shots of the interior, 21'x12', through a wide-angle lens, so it looks longer than it is:
-
Looking north toward the stereo wall. The AC will go over the black spot on the right. -
Looking south toward my desk. Drywall is on the right, awaiting installation.
The electric was done last week. I have an outlet on the middle of the north wall that runs straight form the electrical box. I also have CAT6e cable with RJ45 connections on the north and south walls. I still have to pick out a ceiling fan, and the AC will go in after the drywall. The insulation went in on Thursday, and changed the whole acoustic character of the interior. I know drywall will change it more. And I’m still looking for a color for the concrete stain which will be one of the last details before move-in day. We’re close now.