Subj : Home Lab Projects
To   : All
From : poindexter FORTRAN
Date : Sun Sep 12 2021 14:57:00

I've spent my lockdown building a homelab, mostly out of spare parts I had 
laying around or parts bought secondhand.

My "server" is an old Thinkpad that I bought for parts, missing keys and 
with a broken screen. It did come with 16 GB of RAM and and i7 CPU. Tossed 
in an SSD I had from an older desktop, and it runs Proxmox like a charm.

In Proxmox, I have a Windows 2019 server and Windows 10 desktop in their 
own domain, an Ubuntu server running Kubernetes, and Proxmox runs LXC 
containers on their own - along with a handful of VMs.

I found a Synology DS1010 chassis, and filled it with 2TB drives I had from 
a recently deceased desktop, spares, and an external drive I'd used for 
backups. That turned into 7.2 TB of RAIDed disk, along with a media server 
and a ton of other software available through Synology. It shares disks vias 
NFS for Proxmox backups/snapshots, and SMB to my Windows machines. I'm going 
to start playing with some of the groupware/cloud features, you could move 
everything off of the cloud with this thing.

I finally picked up a Raspberry Pi 4, and right now I've got it running Pi- 
Hole and Grafana, monitoring my internet connection.

I've upgraded my home router (a Linksys WRT1900ACS) to OpenWRT; it's going 
to run nginx and act as a reverse proxy for my network. Loading apps is a 
lot cleaner with OpenWRT than with DD-WRT - and impossible with the stock 
firmware. It's got a ton of horsepower and I'm looking forward to finally 
using some of it.

I used to use powerline ethernet adapters to extend the network upstairs to 
my office. I finally bit the bullet and had cabling guys run 2 Cat6 cables 
between floors. Gigabit ethernet goodness!

My next project is going to be to upgrade my office wireless to OpenWRT and 
create a guest VLAN along with a lab VLAN to keep lab traffic off of my home 
network. I'd like my newly-created Windows domain to run in its' own 
sandbox and be able to create as clean an environment for testing as I can.

Other projects I've got waiting are to set up Cloudflare, completing an AWS 
class and to move my BBS to a VPS I've been playing with.

I'm pretty happy with the results, mostly because my goal was to re-use 
stuff I'd picked up over the years.


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