I’ve had many routers over the years — Linksys WRT54GL, Linux and iptables, ASUS RT-N66U, Ubiquiti USG, OPNsense, Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, and MikroTik CCR1009. At least those are the ones I can remember.

But I’ve been fascinated by VyOS ever since I first heard about it, even more so after using the EdgeRouter CLI. As both VyOS and EdgeOS are forks of Vyatta.

Fascinated and intimidated is probably more accurate — the lack of a GUI doesn’t give you a lot of help… But at the same time, it’s a great learning experience — you have to know and understand what you are doing 🙂

So I set out to replace my internet facing router — with a virtualized VyOS instance 🙂

I set up a super simple status page for the homelab — using a small bash script, NetBox, AWS S3 and CloudFront.

But ended up using a hosted service instead — HetrixTools.

I’ve already written about my PDU suddenly dying — and in that post I explained that I was going to do some changes to the homelab power layout. It’s time to do those changes 🙂

It’s time for another ZFS pool expansion. When I last expanded; I doubled the capacity of my 2nd vdev — going from 16 TB to 32 TB raw capacity. This time I’m doubling again — replacing the last limiting drive, and fully utilizing the all the 8 TB drives 😃

I’ve been planning to enable scheduled S.M.A.R.T. scans ever since I built my file server, but it was just one of those things that I never got around to do.

Well — when one of the 8 TB drives suddenly started reporting S.M.A.R.T. errors, the scheduled scans got back on the agenda. So let’s do that now 👇

I have a local mail server with Postfix and Dovecot — I use it as a local SMTP smart host, and “notification center”.

While gathering information for this post; I discovered that my file server have been sending me emails, warning me of S.M.A.R.T. errors on a disk in the ZFS pool. Every day — since September!

So I’ve included a section on how to avoid missing important server emails.

My homelab PDU suddenly died! It’s dead, D-E-D, dead! There are few things worse than a server rack suddenly going completely silent…

The PDU has had an error since the power outage last summer — F11 means Power fail on auxiliary 1. Which is an odd error for a PDU with only one input. And; it wasn’t possible to clear or reset it it 😕

I’m using a Raspberry Pi to communicate with the power equipment in my homelab rack; the UPS, ATS and PDU. For the UPS, I’m using NUT (Network UPS Tools), and for the ATS and PDU; my own PowerWalker Python library.

In this post I’ll be going through how I’ve set up the NUT server to communicate with my PowerWalker VI 1500 RT HID UPS, and NUT clients running on all other physical machines in the rack.

I recently decided to give Altibox and their 6rd implementation another go — searching the interwebs I stumbled upon a Norwegian forum post that read (translation by me):

Altibox offers native dual-stack IPv6 if your home central is in bridge mode. You get a /56 prefix though DHCPv6-PD (prefix delegation) and can split it into multiple /64 networks. (…) — sveinse

WHAT!? Really? They offer native dual-stack IPv6 with DHCPv6-PD? Let’s test it! 🥳

Back in August I wrote about connecting my ISP (Altibox) fiber straight into the Mikrotik CCR1009. I’ve since decided not to include the CCR in my network stack, but instead use my EdgeRouter 4 as, well — the edge router, and VyOS to route the local networks.

So I moved the SFP module and fiber from the CCR — to the EdgeRouter 4 👇