RX14's recent activity
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Comment on Does anyone have a homelab? in ~hobbies
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Comment on It's almost the end of the week, how's your week been going so far? in ~talk
RX14 LinkExams just finished, so spent the first part of the week relaxing and playing games with friends. Latter half of the week was taken up by migrating stuff to a new server, and spending today...Exams just finished, so spent the first part of the week relaxing and playing games with friends. Latter half of the week was taken up by migrating stuff to a new server, and spending today (friday) packing up to move out of student accommodation tomorrow. Done a few misc bits of code review for crystal which I work on a lot. Hoping to get a lot more productive on crystal next week after I move back, because a company is sponsoring my work on the language over summer.
I have a rather unconventional "ghetto" homelab, pics here.
My one and only server is an Acer Revo RL80, with pretty shitty specs (Celeron 1007U, 6GiB RAM). It only cost £100 (new) though, and I think for the price it's served me very well. Benefits are that it uses almost no power, is super silent (but the bare disks aren't), while remaining impossible to overheat. It's still a very capable NAS to this day (can easily saturate gigabit using nfs+btrfs).
Since the internal storage is only 500GiB of spinning rust, additional storage is attached using USB3 and put in a BTRFS RAID1. The drives are in a drive cage I ripped from an old dell desktop case by drilling out the rivets. The USB3 to sata adapters are these, and they've been pretty reliable apart from when one of the 12V power supply plugs failed in a power surge/thunderstorm (I just got a replacement power adapter, the actual electronics were fine). BTRFS has served me great, handling several drive failures and several accidental USB3 unplugs. However I'm looking to migrate to the even newer bcachefs when that gets mainlined in the linux kernel. I like to live on the edge and am not overly concerned with availability (it's only for me).
At uni, I'm behind symmetric nat with no LAN to access my nas from, so I've connected a cable directly between my laptop and my nas for when I'm docked. I mount my nas over this using NFS. For when I'm away from my desk, I have cjdns set up which proxies packets to my nas via a dedicated server. Using cjdns allows me to have a single IPv6 address for my server when using both the wired and proxy connection methods, which is fantastic. So I can unplug/replug my laptop and continue my music playback/data transfer/ssh session. Cjdns is also notionally a meshnet, even though I just use it as a fancy VPN, which allows me to connect to some fancy IRC channels.
It also handles a few additional duties such as running transmission and as a backup target for my various servers. I've just finished setting up backups for the whole nas to B2 and Wasabi, which was fun.
In the next few months I'll be moving out into my own place with full control over my local network (finally!). My current plan is to buy an ER-X (especially because of this) and a UAP-AC-PRO (or LITE if I fail to find a job) and have a nice network for me and my flatmates.