First off, I any of you have been waiting for me to get around to publishing parts 2 & 3 of my SnapCast series, I apologize for the delay. I've finally got my homelab to a state where I can start transitioning my wife over from some of the cloud services we've been using to my self-hosted alternatives. The final push on that was to get backups working properly. Anyways, time just disappeared on me.
So here's those two articles:
I've had a whole bunch of infrastructure type articles in progress for months now. I finally took the time to wrap a bunch of them up. Part of the issue is that so much of the content is inter-related that it feels wrong to publish a single article when a whole bunch of the information depends on understanding some other concept that is covered in a different article that hasn't been completed yet.
What am I trying to accomplish here?
As someone who has always considered himself primarily a programmer, I've also had to be "The IT Guy" for decades, and also "The Unix Guy". This meant that I ended up with a lot of practical experience with networking and data centre configuration and planning. I was in charge of configuring the rulebase on a CheckPoint FW1 firewall before some of you were born.
At the same, I never really wanted to do this stuff, but somebody had to, and it had to be done right. But it was all "hands-on", and I would have killed myself before I'd go through the misery of getting something like a Cisco certification.
On top of that, as a programmer I was quite a bit more involved with the business of the company than any of the networking guys we eventually ended hiring. This meant that my role morphed into being the guy that could help the network techies understand how their plumbing was going to be used by the business.
I look at what it takes me to build a homelab, and I realize just how much I lean on the things I learned over decades of being "The IT Guy", and I wonder how hard it must be for people without that kind of a background.
I've read through much of the FUTO article, and i can only think that even that is a hard slog for non-technical beginners. I thought that if I could share some of the things that I've learned about putting together a homelab over the past year or so, while trying to explain the underlying concepts involved, then it might help someone...and it keeps me busy and off the streets.
Back to the article dump...
Next is an article about DNS servers and, specifically, Technitium.
Going hand-in-hand with that, is an article about how You Need a Public Domain.
Finally, an article I've been sitting on forever that talks about the Lenovo M910Q Servers that I have been using in my Proxmox cluster.
In case you're interested, I'm also working on articles about systemd, a Proxmox introduction, resilency and recovery, network security, accessing services, VPN integration and linux basics.
As always, I'm interested in any feedback you may have, including stuff I got wrong or missed out, and whether there's any content you'd like to see. Thx.
From the Lenovo article:
You can use the WiFi M2 slot underneath the SATA caddy for another NIC, i just did that! My m910q had a fitting cover at the back, for the p320 (with removed GPU) it's currently just hanging out. Got "M.2 Key A+E/PCI-E 2,5G Gigabit Ethernet Netzwerk Lan Karte 1000Mbps RTL8125BG Chip" from eBay. Working great so far (just a week or so though).
I watched a whole bunch of videos about those and it totally looks like they would work electronically. But most of them wouldn't fit in any of the ports on the back without modification and 3D printing magic. Some people left them "just hanging out".
So, there's also a 4 port Ethernet card fitted specifically for the m series tiny lines that you used to be able to get from Lenovo with a riser (your specific model may not have a riser). You can still get it on eBay, but AliExpress is probably your spot if you're not a big spender.
Some specific revisions in the tiny lines won't even have the spot where you'd plug a riser card into populated, I think the 910q may be one of the ones where it's missing. The qs sometimes indicate the lowest spec but not always. The m910x will definitely have it and most specialty models in the m9xx(x) range will also have a riser slot. The cards come with a specially fitted bracket you can use though that will fit pretty seamlessly. The bracket is purchaseable separately pretty often and is repurposable with a bit of planning.
My purchases of used Lenovo hardware became problematic long ago. If you can spend the extra money on the x variants, you'll also usually get a better heat sink which might let you actually use all of your CPU without having to leave the top of the case off. The heatsink is real rough to buy separately.
Yeah, there is a line of units that has a PCI slot that then requires a riser card in order to be able to use it. The problem is that those units, from what I've seen, tend to cost at least twice as much as the M910Q/M710Q. Even the M920Q/M720Q are significantly more expensive. Not to mention, a bit more difficult to get hold of.
IMHO, once you're talking about dropping $300-$350 on one of these models with the riser card, you really have to think hard about whether it's worth it for 6th/7th generation Core i5 processors. Especially if you're looking at a cluster of three. It seems highly probable that you could get something with an 11th/12th generation processor and multiple or 2.5GB ethernet ports for only a bit more, and you'd end up only needing two of them instead of three, and price might end up being a wash.
I am really, really curious to see how external USB 2.5GB or 5GB adapters would work. I'm getting the impression that they are a lot more reliable than they were even a few years ago, and might be a viable, cheap option.
All that being said, network speed hasn't been an issue for me so far, and I'm not convinced that CEPH + HA, is a path I should be going down. Or a path that's worth it for most self-hosters.
So far, the only thing that I've encountered that pushes the CPU on an ongoing basis is Frigate, and even that is performing well and not affecting other containers on the same host. But I'm still adding services to my cluster, so who knows.
You can get x variants for under 100 too but you got to be more patient. Larger resellers don't always understand the difference in models. Man, to be honest, I don't either. You don't have to go this in depth but look at the rear view for addons on the eBay listing. I usually don't worry about buying ones with warranty/etc and I've only been burned once (probably water damage).
In my experience, if you're wanting to use a USB Ethernet 2.5g or more, you may want to come up with at least a USB c port. I get that it should work with USB 3 but the speeds in practice just never worked out for me. I could have been facing those reliability issues you mentioned. Experiments in that area may eventually lead you back to scavenging for models that accommodate a riser card for 10g which is a very well weathered path. If you want Ceph, it's not absolutely required but you're probably going to end up there. I wouldn't do Ceph again.
Somewhat similar on the CPU, I only discovered problems when I started experimenting with mass video re-encoding which is probably similar to the workload on Frigate. With the top on, I can only really use about half the cpus consistently without facing slowdowns due to heat. CPU upgrades are also mostly out.
Minor segue: If you haven't checked out the servethehome forums, highly recommended. It's probably the best source of knowledge on these.