In the fall of 2022 I turned off Zeta, my file server, due to the extreme price of electricity. I migrated all the data to a 3x18 TB raidz1 pool on Alpha instead.

But last year I brought it back — and used the opportunity to add some more memory, and rebuild the main storage pool 🤓

When I was trying out Netdata last year — I noticed I had lots of inbound_packets_dropped_ratio warnings, on multiple nodes.

Time to investigate 👇

I’m using a Shelly Plus Plug S smart plug to measure the power usage of my homelab. I added it as a device in Home Assistant — and the power readings began! Kind of…

Within a few days; I noticed something strange with the graph history — there were long periods of time where the graph was completely flat. Logging into the Shelly web interface, I could see the watt reading changing — without this being reflected in Home Assistant.

I’ve been having a strange problem with outgoing WireGuard traffic, the problem has probably always been there — I just haven’t noticed, until now. Outgoing WireGuard traffic is very slow, while incoming is what I’d except with my 750/750 fiber internet connection.

This lead me down a rabbit hole of testing performance internally, which I documented in a previous blog post. That turned out to be a queue issue on the SFP+ port on my MikroTik CHR router. Could this also be queue related?

I built a rack out of wood in 2004 — it was at home, and a lab, of sorts, so I guess that makes it a homelab 🙂

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and look at 20 years’ worth of homelabbing ❤️

While doing some WireGuard testing between local peers; I noticed weird performance issues on my virtual MikroTik router. This lead me down a rabbit hole of testing the layer 3 throughput on my virtual CHR.

The bit rate started at close to 10 Gbit/s, but then dropped to 3-4 — only in one direction 🤷 Time to investigate…

My homelab rack has been running as is for a while now — it’s time for a few new projects.

I’m rearranging stuff to better utilize the space, looking into 25 Gbit networking, and putting a HP Z440 server to good use 🙂

I stumbled onto NextDNS recently — it’s like a cloud hosted Pi-hole. I tried it for a few days, but this post isn’t about that.

Reading about the different block lists in NextDNS, and digging deeper into DNS ad blocking gave me motivation to change my current setup — and that is what this post is about 🙂

Searching for a tool to keep track of IP addresses; I stumbled onto Netbox — and was blown away by what it could do 🤯 I could put everything there: racks, servers, patch panels, Wi-Fi access points, power distribution, network runs. Everything!

Last year — I wrote about plans for my home network, or home network v2, as I called it. Let’s take a look at what I have done, what remains, and what has changed since then.