Since being DDoS continuously earlier this year, I've set up extra caching in front of my site. Originally I just had Nginx's proxy cache, but that topped out around 100 Mbps of continuous bandwidth and maybe 5-10,000 requests per second on my little DigitalOcean VPS.

So then I added Cloudflare's proxy caching service on top, and now I've been able to handle months with 5-10 TB of traffic (with multiple spikes of hundreds of mbps per second).

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...or at least, not without a lot of patience or a fat wallet.

But why? And are there any signs Raspberry Pis will become available to the general public again soon?

To be clear, I'm speaking of the mainstream SBC Raspberry Pis, like the Pi 4 model B, the Compute Module 4, the Pi Zero 2 W, and even in many cases the Pi 400. The Pico and Pico W are both readily available, at least in most markets where I've looked (local shortages always exist, but typically not for months or years like with full-size Pis).

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AnsibleFest is fast approaching, and this year it'll finally be back in person, in Chicago. Since that's a short jaunt from St. Louis, I'll be headed up to talk about my Homelab this year!

More specifically, I'll be giving a talk titled Ansible for the Homelab, and I'll walk through how I have at least part of my sprawling homelab environment automated using Ansible.

I'll be posting a version of the AnsibleFest talk to my YouTube channel, but leading up to it, the folks at UCTRONICS sent me their Pi Rack Pro to test out. I've been running four Raspberry Pi 4 model B computers in my rack for the past year, each one assuming a certain amount of responsibility for my homelab:

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According to AI, this is me.

Or at least, what I look like if I deliver the prompt Jeff Geerling, realistic, photograph, sharp focus to Stable Diffusion, a machine learning, text-to-image model. But if you take that same prompt and paste it into the Stable Diffusion Demo, you'll get a different result.

Dall-E 2 and Stable Diffusion are two frontrunners in the current AI/ML image generation race. Put in the right descriptive text, and the machine learning models that were trained using many terabytes of image data will churn out something surreal and synthetic, yet alarmingly real.

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This is the BliKVM PCIe, a full computer on a PCI Express card. This is an IP KVM (Internet Protocol Keyboard-Video-Mouse) that can be put inside another computer or server.

Most server motherboards already have remote 'lights-out' management functionality built in. Most frequently this is referred to as IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface, but Dell calls it iDRAC, and HPE calls it ILO.

But not all servers have it. And even if they do, sometimes you have to pay extra money to use it, or the version you have goes unmaintained and it would be a security risk to keep it running on your network.

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I watched TheOdd1sOut's How to Find Inspiration¹ and remembered the most important lesson I learned from my high school English teacher:

Short is good. Short is hard.

The teacher² didn't exactly put it like that. But he harped on something nobody else did: writing concisely.

Every week we would read a work of American literature. And every Friday we'd turn in a one-pager encapsulating our knowledge of the book. I was an odd duck for how much I enjoyed the game: no playing with margins or font sizes. I had to cram an entire book into one page, double-spaced, with 1" margins, a title line, and a byline.

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