Posts

I had a random thought today, triggered, by all things, by a short training on Reduce, Reuse, Recycle at work. This is the principle of first looking for the potential to not produce anything. Then to look for a new use for something old that has already been manufactured. And only then, as a final step, to recycle the thing. I, and probably many other Homelabbers, have quite a bit of older hardware laying around. Hardware that’s still perfectly functional, but which is either too slow, or doesn’t support newer features etc. For me, that’s only two things, because I was a poor student until relatively recently. 😉. The first one not discussed here is a desktop from 2017 which I replaced in 2019. It is an AMD Ryzen 1700x. Still a powerful machine, but quite honestly: A bit more powerful and power hungry than my new many small and less powerful machines Homelab principle calls for. ...

This is the next post in the Current Homelab series, where I give an overview of what my lab is currently looking like. This time, I will be talking about my storage layer, which is mostly made up of Ceph. I chose Ceph around spring 2021, when I decided to go from a baremetal+docker-compose setup to a VM based setup with LXD. At the time, my main storage consisted of a pair of WD Red 4TB disks for my main storage requirements, and a 60GB crucial SATA SSD for my server’s root FS. While going through the LXD docs, I saw that it supported something called “Ceph RBD” for its VM volumes. ...

I’ve finally made my decision and bought a server rack. The main reason is this: Those two large cases in the middle house my two Turing Pi 2 boards with four Raspberry Pi CM4s each. I’ve written about them here. The rightmost big tower case houses my “old” x86 server, which I’m retiring soon. The elongated black case with the fan grill in the front on the shelf is an Odroid H3, serving as a Ceph storage cluster node. The other two nodes I’ve currently got are running in VMs on the x86 server. I would like to move those onto another pair of H3s. ...

You are about to witness this blog’s first rant. Proceed with caution, or not at all if you’re so inclined. Without further ado: Piss off. No, I don’t need this many machines. I want this many physical machines. Every single one of them was a very conscious decision driven by a clear design goal. Is your standard reaction to somebody excitedly telling you about their newest hobby toy really “do you need this much of your hobby?” or “but it costs so much!”? My fucking goodness. ...

In my previous post on the hardware I am using, I mentioned that I don’t like my large Arch Linux x86 server very much. Here, I will be going into the details of the problem I am having and how I solved it. The problem So until not very long ago at all, I only had a single server, with everything running in a couple of Docker containers. Then COVID came, and I decided that extending my homelab would be the perfect hobby for these lockdown times. So I went and bought a beefier server with an Intel 10th Gen CPU and 96 GB of RAM. Then I found LXD and started introducing VMs. I also discovered Ceph and started using it as my storage layer. ...