It's Been A Minute...

Long time, no blog.

I thought it was time for a bit of an update on my current situation and projects that I've got going at the moment.

The big one is that I finally have an actual office to work in from home. Our loft was already boarded out, but some helpful tool in the past had insulated it by taking a load of yellow fiberglass up there and chucking it across the floor.... So we got all of this fastened up on to the roof and covered over with felt. A large amount of very unpleasant cleaning later, and I have me some space.

I've moved my homelab setup up there, and have room to get my nice old desk set up and use my awesome office chair. It's also given me some space to set up a bunch of my older consoles. Which is nice.

Just before the first lock-down was announced I had finally persuaded work to buy me a couple of decent sized monitors (HPs although I can't remember the model) and a dual-screen mounting arm. These sat in an empty office, burning warranty, for several months until I had my desk set up. Now it's in my man-cave and looking pretty cool, if I do say so myself...

My homelab has evolved a bit too.

Since I last posted on here I have acquired a HPE ML30 Gen 9, which is now easily the best of my fleet. I scored a bargain 64GB of RAM for it from Ebay, bought a couple of extra hotswap caddies, and installed ProxMox on a ZFS mirror made up of two cheap 32GB SSDs. It's ridiculously fast to boot and easily handles the amount of VMs I've got running on it at the moment.

The Dell host that used to run ESXi has had a SSD boot drive fitted too and is also now running ProxMox, and the addition of my old Dell desktop running ProxMox but no VMs has allowed me to build a HA cluster. Supergeek nice!

My Raspberry Pi 3b is running PiHole and Motion using an old USB webcam for that added bit of totally unnecessary lab security.

I'll probably go in to detail on actual setup of all of this in another post, but briefly, I'm running:

• Docker on Ubuntu Server - Unifi Controller, DDNs update agent
• Plex on Ubuntu Server
• Windows Server 2019 - AD, DNS, DHCP
• Windows Server 2016 Core - AD, DNS
• Backup PiHole on Ubuntu Server
• ProxMox Backup Server with passthrough to NFS share - another blog there!
• Windows 10
• Various Linux desktops - Linux Mint, Parrot Security, Kali

Obviously a HA cluster is total overkill for this lot, but this is why we homelab :D