I’ve written a few posts now about my Home network v2 project. What’s the plan? Let’s go through that now.

Ever since I got the fiber installed last year, the plan has been to drop the ISP box and plug it straight into my router. That’s why I had the fiber terminated in my patch panel.

I’ve been reluctant to do it, since messing with the internet needs to be done while the rest of the house is sleeping. And I was unsure what SFP module to use. I did buy the Ubiquiti UF-SM-1G-S pair, planning to use it with my EdgeRouter.

But I ended up using the SFP module that came with the ISP box, and my new MikroTik CCR1009.

The swap was super easy and only took a few minutes 😃

When I began replacing my Unifi switches with MikroTik — I was very impressed with the MikroTik devices. So when I found a CCR1009-7G-1C-1S Core router, second hand, for a reasonable price — there was no reason not to buy it.

RouterOS seemed daunting at first; so I watched a lot of YouTube videos from The Network Berg, which increased my confidence 🙂

The last month or so I’ve been replacing my Ubiquity Unifi switches. It’s part of a complete network rebuild — more posts will follow…

Four years ago; when I first got into the Unifi system, I loved the single pane of glass admin interface. But now I feel that the interface is too glossed over, prioritizing looks over function. The new Unifi controller UI is just terrible…

I like networking, it’s one of my hobbies. I want VLANs to be named VLANs, not network isolation.

I’ve got yet another Inter-Tech rack mountable server case. I really wanted a few hot swappable disk bays in the front, and buying two removable 4-drive backplanes were more expensive than getting a new case 😮

So I sold the 4U-4129-N and moved Alpha into this case instead 🙂

A few days ago; sitting outside — drinking coffee and minding my own business, I received an email from my UPS:

Utility power not available.

2021/06/01 18:38:27

My homelab had lost both power sources 😮 This whole area had a power outage — a good opportunity to do a UPS and power down test 😛

I moved my main hypervisor, Alpha, into a new server case; a compact Inter-Tech with 8 hot-swappable bays in the front.

I also moved the four SSDs over from the failed ZFS SSD pool project, and this time it worked! 😃

One (potential) downside to running public services on your homelab, is that you expose your IP address. That may, or may not, be a problem — but here are ways around it. The simplest way is to put Cloudflare in front, but this will only handle web traffic, and is a bit of a black box.

Another, more hands-on, approach is to use a VPS (or LXC container); WireGuard and iptables. We will create a secure tunnel between the VPS/container and the homelab HAProxy instance, and forward traffic using iptables.

This post was suppose to be a “look I made an SSD ZFS pool”, but will instead be the first post in a trouble-shooting series. Trying to get my SSDs to behave.

But — I am getting ahead of myself… Let’s start at the beginning.

In our new house there is an 20 m² basement, it consists of two rooms — both 10 m². I have turned the inner room into my new home office/server room, with my electronics lab and homelab.