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Self-hosting with AT&T Fiber Internet

Today I got AT&T Fiber Internet installed at my house, and I thought I'd document a few things I observed during and after the install.

They trenched fiber boxes between pairs of houses in my neighborhood. It seems like they have little fiber hubs for 8 houses in a set, and those little hubs connect back to the main neighborhood box with an 8 or 10-strand cable, directly buried in the ground.

Apparently my street's main run was kinked somewhere, and only one of the strands had full signal, so I'm the lucky winner who signed up first, and I get that fiber until they run a new cable underground :)

BGW320 AT&T Internet Gateway - Fiber

Build your own private WireGuard VPN with PiVPN

I am frequently away from home (whether on family vacation, a business trip, or out around town), but I have a number of important resources on my home network—as any homelabber does.

There are services I like to access remotely like my NAS with my giant media library, my edit server with all my active projects, and especially Home Assistant, which lets me monitor all aspects of my home.

Some people rely on individual cloud services from IoT vendors and have a bunch of apps to connect to each type of device independently. As someone who has dealt with numerous security breaches for numerous services, I know not to trust 50 different cloud-connected devices in my home.

That's why I'm a 'self-hosted' homelabber, and why I try to find devices that don't leave my local network.

First look: ASUSTOR's new 12-bay all-M.2 NVMe SSD NAS

Last year, after I started a search for a good out-of-the-box all-flash-storage setup for a video editing NAS, I floated the idea of an all-M.2 NVMe NAS to ASUSTOR. I am not the first person with the idea, nor is ASUSTOR the first prebuilt NAS company to build one (that honor goes QNAP, with their TBS-453DX).

But I do think the concept can be executed to suit different needs—like in my case, video editing over a 10 Gbps network with minimal latency for at least one concurrent user with multiple 4K streams and sometimes complex edits, without lower-bitrate transcoded media (e.g. ProRes RAW).

ASUSTOR Flashstor 12 Pro - front and top

Testing a 96-core Ampere Altra Developer Platform

If you're tired of waiting for Apple to migrate its Mac Pro workstation-class desktop to Apple Silicon, the Ampere Altra Developer Platform might be the next best thing:

Ampere Altra Developer Platform in Jeff Geerling's workshop

I somehow convinced Ampere/ADLINK to send me a workstation after my now years-long frustrated attempts at getting graphics cards working on the Raspberry Pi. And they sent me a beast of a machine: