Building a Homelab - Part 2 - What I'm Running
In my last post I talked about how I used to work, how things have developed over the years (probably coinciding with my waning interest in tinkering with tech) with fewer toys to play with, and my recent acquisitions which have rekindled my enthusiasm somewhat.
Here is my current #homelab in all of its kitchen based glory:
I quite like it here, and the wife is yet to complain. Beats having it in the living room....
We have:
- The two servers mentioned in my previous post.
- Raspberry Pi 3 B+ running Raspberian. Not sure what I'm going to do with this yet...
- Synology DS218+ with 2x 4TB drives, RAID1 - Backups and ISO storage.
- APC BackUPS ES700
- Sophos SG310 that I'm intending to flash to XG v18
- Cisco Catalyst 2960 - won't be on all the time but I need to brush up on my decade old Cisco knowledge!
- TP-Link TLSG100SD Gigabit switch - I'd like a bigger, layer 3, but this will do for now.
- TP-Link 400Mbps powerline running to my router. I will be replacing this with a Gigabit setup come payday...
- Some USB DVD drives run straight through to a VM for backing up my DVD library so that I can consign it to a box in the loft.
The Fujitsu is runnning FreeNAS 11.3 and currently has 4 1TB drives (3 in RAIDz, 1 spare). This for the most part is holding my media collection, but has some datastore space dedicated to large ISO images and config info. My plan for this is to get 3 of the largest drives I can afford to put in another RAIDz, and then start replacing the 1TB drives with bigger ones until the pool can expand itself. The server is booting from mirrored 16GB USB drives. I'm totally new to FreeNAS, but anyone with some Linux knowledge, knowledge of storage systems, or at the very least the willingness to do some reading should be fine.
The Dell is running ESXi 6.7 free with a range of VMs:
- Windows Server 2019 Core - AD, DNS, DHCP
- Windows 10 Enterprise
- Ubuntu Server 20.04 running Docker.
- Ubuntu Server 20.04 running Nagios
- Ubuntu Desktop 20.04
- Kali Linux
- Folding at Home on Ubuntu - Not working yet, but I'll get there...
- Nakivo
Containers running are:
My new parts all arrived more or less together this morning (miracle!), so I've fitted a 240GB SSD to move OS virtual drives on to, and two 32GB SSDs - 1 is being used for system swap, and the other for the system drive of my Nakivo appliance. I'm hoping that having the OS disks on separate physical disks will speed up my backups. The backups are going to the Synology NAS, and then replicating to Wasabi.
I'm intending to do some deeper digs into various bits of the system like FreeNAS and Docker. Docker in particular is something I'm totally new to and am enjoying tinkering with, so documenting what I'm doing should be worth while.
Have a picture of the innards of the Dell.
