I know we have a decent amount of people here who fill the middle space of the hardware nerd - IT career venn diagram, and I know I’ve seen mentions of homelabs around these parts of the internet.
So, since my 19" rack no longer has any audio equipment in it and is becoming a dedicated homelab, and my music-making has stalled to essentially a halt and I have no other places on the internet I really care to talk to people, this seemed like a perfectly sensible place to start a homelab thread. Anything goes, I s’pose - gear share, career talk, advice, whatever.
I’ll start with a lil intro: I have a longer-term career goal to pivot from software to hardware/networking, so a few years ago I put together a custom Unraid build for a NAS/media server. Last week I picked up a Mikrotik router and switch, and have a cheap Dell Optiplex 7050 micro coming to use as a practice playground. I’ve heard the Mikrotik learning-curve to be a bit steep, so I’m looking forward to it.
I often think I’ll do this, and I have two or three friends who already do this.
We used those at my previous job to connect to partner VPNs. I briefly looked into flashing a “fresh” one so we could configure it like the others we were using, but the documentation (mostly on our company’s side) was lacking and we found other workarounds.
The “fanciest” thing I’ve done at home was diagnose and fix how my neighbour’s WIFI router and all their attached devices were visible and reachable on my home network. I don’t mean that I could see their WiFi router, I mean that their router was available on our network (and presumably ours on theirs). I could open up their router admin pages. Sometimes our devices would get DHCP from their router, rather than ours. Eventually I guessed that we were both using the same or similar powerline adaptors (to share ethernet over the power cables), and that somehow our houses were electrically linked. I later heard that it’s likely our houses share a common ground, so perhaps that’s what allowed the networks to see one another. I’d be happy to learn more details if anyone here knows anything. My fix was to put new passwords on the powerline adaptors.
I’m on the electronics repairs and failure analysis side of the diagram not really quite doing IT stuff but my work requires a decent amount of networking knowledge. The IT guys always seem a bit jealous of all the old ass equipment we get to work with. I imagine there is more opportunity for people in IT though than the circuit analysis type stuff I do.
It was a bit of a learning curve but overall a pretty friendly way to get into managing a server. I’ve done a few other fun things on it like set up a dev server on a VM, setup a VPN, and other such routing things. Tried running some game servers but it didn’t work very well - might try again soon. I was trying to convince some people to cruise open maps on Assetto Corsa with me.
That’s a new one for me, I’m interested in the how of that one too.
Damn, and I can’t even link the floors in the house I’m renting, as I discovered yesterday after blowing 30 bucks on the powerline adapters. All three floors are basically separate branches, no cross-talk possible.
How was your experience with the powerline adapters performance? I have an old workstation that I run proxmox on to host test VMs. I do pseudo dev ops type work and I like to keep templates around to try stuff out. The wifi reception in the corner it sits is spotty and I would totally trade off some throughput for a solid connection that doesnt drop.
It’s rare that our household has more than one person streaming video at the same time. We often stream music and video at the same time, with no issues. None of us play games where latency would be a concern. I found it stable enough for our uses.
The one downside I noticed was that it would interfere with my audio set-up. I could often hear “modem noise” when doing audio work. If I was ready to record for releases, it would be an noticeable but not major inconvenience. Timing, or unplugging the powerline in the “studio” would probably have got around it.
Honestly I’m a pretty mediocre software dev and feel I’ve either hit or am beyond my skill level in my current role. I get decent marks, but I never got past the impostor-syndrome phase - I struggle with gray-area decision making so am looking for something with more definitive solutions in the day to day. I worked as a support engineer previously and in a lot of ways aside from salary I liked it better, and since learning a bit more about the infrastructure side, I’ve been wondering if that might be a better fit for me.
My previous line manager enjoyed repeating this aphorism: “imposters don’t get imposter syndrome”. I try not to hang onto aphorisms too tightly, but I do like this one.
I started with a Synology NAS and not long after realized I wanted to do more with a home server so I built an Unraid setup in a Node 304 case. The Synology was okay, easy to setup, but the performance was pretty bad.
Kinda wish I had got a rackmount case since I’ve got a janky stack of HDDs connected outside the case now, but I’m limited by depth since I’ve just got an audio rack. Been mulling over various reconfiguration options but I don’t think I have any reason other than aesthetics to change things up for now.
Maaan I am really trying not to do this. I am quite confident with unix/software but I feel like this is one of those things where I might prefer just a turnkey solution. I even have a pretty good desktop computer that I could repurpose.