homelab

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 :)

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).

This week I finally moved my gaming/Linux PC into my little office rack—it's that 2U box above the UPS at the bottom:

I remembered seeing Linus Tech Tips' 4U build in a video a couple years ago—but he has a full 42U rack in his basement. I don't have that much space—just 2U (technically 3U if I wanted) in my little under-desk studio rack.

So after working with them last year on a similar build (but with a prototype case), I got in touch with MyElectronics and they sent over their new production Mini ITX short-depth 2U PC case.

This is the Compute Blade, and I'm test driving it in a four-node cluster:

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.

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.

An ode to the homelabber:

As a software developer, I never was a true sysadmin. I never pulled a server to replace a failed drive at 3 a.m. I never got to roll my little maintenance cart through a cold aisle, with hearing protection to keep my fragile eardrums from rupturing amidst a sea of 100+ dB screaming server fans...

That title is awfully specific.

But I was building a new FreeBSD server with a used SuperMicro motherboard with IPMI. The default password was changed from ADMIN (or maybe it's a new enough board that it's a random password), and when I was booted into FreeBSD, I wanted to reset the IPMI settings so I could be sure I was starting fresh.

ipmitool that came with my FreeBSD install doesn't seem to be able to reset IPMI to factory defaults, so I tried running ipmicfg from Supermicro's website (which is annoying to download—you have to fill out a form and a Captcha for the privilege).

Recently this website's been the target of malicious DDoS attacks.

But after accidentally leaking my home IP address in some network benchmarking clips in a recent YouTube video, the same attacker (I assume) decided to point the DDoS cannon at my home IP.

I have things relatively locked down here—more on homelab security coming soon!—but a DDoS isn't something most residential ISPs take too kindly. So it was time for me to recycle my home IP. Lucky for me, I don't pay for a static IP address. That makes home hosting more annoying sometimes, since I have to deal with tunnels and dynamic DNS, but it also means I can hop to a new IP address if one is under attack.

Getting a new IP address

At least with the DOCSIS 3.1 modem I'm using, the overall process is as follows:

MyElectronics, a small business in the Netherlands, specializes in small computer rackmount solutions. They sent me these two racks (a 1U and 2U Raspberry Pi rack) and asked me to test them out and compare them to the 3D Printed Raspberry Pi Rack I built earlier this year, based on a design by Russ Ross.

They also have a 3U Raspberry Pi rackmount unit, but I won't be reviewing that here.

The contents of this review are summarized in this video I posted on YouTube: