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.
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.