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 🤓
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 ❤️
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’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 🙂
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.
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.
I first got the server rack back in 2011. At the time I lived alone in a house; I had a UPS, single server, a few cheap NAS’ and a switch in it. When I met my girlfriend, and we moved together about two years later the rack went into storage. And it stayed in storage until we bought our house late 2014, where we currently live. The rack was put to use in my home office in the basement, but not really utilized much. It’s only lately, and after I found /r/homelab, that the rack was truly put to use in my current homelab.
My first “rack” was made of wood. It monitored, meaning displayed and alerted, on some metrics on my Linux server. And controlled a few lights and the alarm system in my room.
I really enjoyed making the computer control the lights.
