The blog series are living documents, so I will be updating the specific articles or adding new ones as I continue to fine tune my home lab cluster.

The code for all of these articles in located on my Gitlab.

Intro

Holy vacation, Batman! I've been gone for a while, and haven't been as active on my blog lately, but I promise that it was for a good reason. I've finally started my homelab, and have some really exciting content to share with the void.

As mentioned in my Running bitwarden_rs on Kubernetes blog post, I planned on running my own kubernetes cluster at home. Back in my junior year of college, I happened to land on a project with a peer of mine named Jason (Jason, if you're reading this, thank you!). He happened to have an old server chassis laying around that he was willing to part ways with. The server chassis was a Chenbro RM21706, but had no drives, no motherboard or compute components, and only included the RAID card, chassis fans, and power supply. However, it was the beginning of a server, and I was determined to have it be my server. Quickly, I found an ATX-E motherboard on Facebook marketplace with 2 Quad Core Xeon processors, their cooling blocks, and 32GB of DDR2 RAM (yes, you read that right). However, the motherboard only cost me a whopping $25, so I couldn't pass up the chance to boot up this server and get it running. After buying it from the seller, rushing home and ripping the top panel off of the chassis, I was on my way to starting this thing up.

However, I quickly found out that the old motherboard I had bought was LOUD, like really loud. When I turned the thing on, even in our storage closet, it sounded like a vacuum cleaner was running in the other room. The old Intel CPU cooler ran at super high RPMs, and I didn't want to mess with the BIOS to get the noise level down when I could invest in something a little more modern. This would also allowed me to keep the power costs down, as I was going to be running this in my home 24/7. The Chenbro was fun to play around with, but for running a 24/7 server with home utilities, it was just too loud and power hungry. So instead, I decided to invest around $400 in a new (to me) Dell r620. This little 1U server was not only much more power efficient, but it also was much quieter than the old Chenbro, even being a 1U. The specs of the machine are as follows:

• CPU: 2x Intel E5-2670
• RAM: 128 GB DDR3
• 8x 1TB 2.5in Seagates

I threw the thing in my server box and booted it up. Looking at my Kill-A-Watt, the new R620 would cost me around $12/month to run 24/7. Great, much cheaper than the $50 I was spending on a minimal kubernetes cluster in the cloud.

Setup

First, I had to install Proxmox on the servers. I decided to go with Proxmox because it is really just a modified version of Debian under the hood, and for my home environment, I would rather have something I am familiar with instead of something that is "more secure." This kind of led me to stray away from ESXi and other platforms, which instead have custom kernels for virtualization. After I grabbed the latest Proxmox image, I dd'd the ISO to a space USB drive I had laying around to create a bootable disk.

TL;DR: I setup my home networking with virtualized Opnsense and piHole. Yes, it is overly complex, but I kept my networking knowledge somewhat sharp.

I've always been curious about networking infrustructure, ever since the early days of my prepubescent childhood. I remember when I first got my xbox 360 around my 6th grade birthday, I immediately was curious on how it connected to the internet, how it connected to xbox's servers, and how hostbooters were able to find my "address" called an ip address and kick me offline. For those who don't know, "hostbooting" is gamer slang for a DoS attack on a client's public ip address. Essentially flooding their home network with packets to disconnect them from online gaming services. People would disconnect players on the other team for an easy win.

Anyway, that passion always carried itself with my all the way until my first intership at Datto, where I was pulnged head first into the world of networking. I remember going into the job thinking: I've been programming for over 3 years at this point. I'm pretty comfortable with computers, and have programmed a few things into my raspberry pi. I can handle this internship.

Oh my, it has been a while since I have posted a blog. One of my new years' resolutions for 2025 is to become healthier, and I am sure many of you reading this can relate to that. Part of that mission for me is to express a lot of the goals and ideas I have with the software community at large, as well as write some of my own projects, scripts and ideas down so that I can refer back to them later. Hopefully this will inspire some of you to do the same.

With that, I figured the first part of this journey would be to write an article about the evolution of the hardware I run at home, how it's setup, and where I see it going in the future. This article is mostly going to be a high level overview of my hardware and the tools I run on it so that I can provide some context to the future articles I plan on writing. Stay tuned for those.