I’m replacing a disk and and expanding my ZFS 2×RAID-Z2 pool 👇

So we bought a new house — now to disassemble everything and prepare to move!

My file server, Zeta, has an mdadm RAID6 array with eight 4 TB disks. I want to expand, but before doing so I’m going to migrate to ZFS.

I’m using Prometheus to monitor my home office and homelab, I figured it would be cool to have a stack light show the active warnings and alerts from Alertmanager. So I made a HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) for the Raspberry Pi to drive a five-colored stack light.

I was quite happy with the previous Inter-Tech case I got, so I decided to get another. This time I got a rack mountable storage case, with 16 hot swap bays, for my file server Zeta. More thoughts and photos!

I’ve used this case a lot over the years — I first got one back in 2011, for my first rack mountable server. At the most, I had four of these in my homelab rack. They were relatively cheap, and easy to get.

Over the years I’ve sold most of them off, replacing them with Inter-Tech 4U-4129-N and 4U-4416. And my desktop computer have moved out of the server rack and into a regular desktop case.

I recently got a new rack mountable case from Inter-Tech — it was surprisingly cheap 😃 This is going to be the new server case for my hypervisor Alpha. Here are my thoughts, and some photos.

Late 2018 I finally pulled the trigger and bought a Unifi 16XG 10GbE switch, I’ve wanted one for a long time. When I plugged it in for the first time, I realized it was pretty loud… It was the loudest thing in my rack — bummer.

The homelab is in my home office, man-cave, workshop — which is in the basement. The room is pretty well insulated, and heat generated here, mostly by the homelab, stays here. I needed a way to keep the temperature down in the hot summer months and during the cold winters. Well — this is it!

I’ve got a tiny computer lab at home; a 29U rack with servers, UPS, ATS, PDU, 10 Gbit networking, OPNsense, and all the cool stuff.