I loved the "normal person's" homelab tour! People on the Internet present their places like a set from Gattaca, usually giving a vibe of something that is too pristine to ever be messed with.
@17:23 on the couch being romantic with your girlfriend. J/K it was funny how you were lovingly embracing your PC....LOL Great video this is my new favorite channel. Lik'd and Sub'd
There's been a lot of things PFSense has done that I don't like but not allowing people to sell pre-flashed devices isn't one of them. If I'm not mistaken it's because people were selling devices with modified PFSense installations that were doing nefarious things. Good hygiene is reinstalling your firewall firmware on new hardware anyway - unless it's from a trusted vendor.
@@apalrdsadventures I really like OpenWRT on x86 hardware (have had great results on Qotom boxes). I'm a Linux guy, and there are a ridiculous amount of packages ready to go, and everything can be configured with text files if it isn't available in the GUI (it's Linux :)).
@@apalrdsadventures Would you ever consider doing a blog post or video about your thoughts on pfSense and Netgate? I'm interested in what the issues are.
Dude! Now I know why I subscribed to your channel. I love networking and I've been so distant from it due to my day-to-day stuff. Just watching your videos for the past hour gets me motivated to get back to what I love doing. I Your setup is very similar to mine. love that your network isn't way over the top like other UA-camrs that I've seen. There isn't anything wrong with that believe me, but in reality, $$ cost and power consumption are real things. Anyhow, thank you so much for putting time and energy into putting these videos together. You've motivated me and opened my eyes to what's been missing for a while.
If you have space in your rack the spacer plate are great to add above your patch panel just for labeling. Since I went with the bigger rack I put a spacer above the PDU too.
@@apalrdsadventures Ya, my rack is in my shed so I just went with a full open rack. It cost the same as a small closed rack. So I could fill it with spacers that really helped with labeling.
I have same asrock a300, with R5 3400G, and now with 64 gb and 1tb nvme, 1tb of sata ssd and external 1tb of hdd for backups. Running like a beast and covers almost all of my needs, except being a storage appliance, as i would like to have separate trunas system, but cant do it right now , so would highly recommend it. Also thank for cool videos, could`t do some proxmox shenanigans without you telling us about it!
Uh, I have cable modem/router/ap which draws 11W, "small" eaton 3s 850 ups, printer, pc, single board celeron which replaced raspberry (draws few watts with ssd) and it already looks messy with all the power, usb, lan, audio, video cables. I'm happy I'm not a youtuber, cause it seems that it's full time job which requires turning half of a basement into server room with 60TB+ of storage over 10Gbit ethernet plus multiple backups, at least two full frame cameras, professional audio gear, ... I didn't expect that much infrastructure in your apartment.
5:27 I do have the Arris S33 cable modem and its small and has two ports a 1Gbps and 2.5Gbps port which is nice. While its still odd shaped, it is thin and small, and is less than 1U wide so can lay flat on a shelf that has only 1U of space.
Merry Christmas to you and everyone here! Really nice setup and I like the thought behind it. After many raspberry pies for servers nas etc I've built recently in an asrock x300 deskmeet(Barebone) with my old amd 3700x 8c-16th, 64GB @ 3200MHz Ram, 2x8GB WD Red HDDs (for visualized TrueNas) and 1TB M2 for Proxmox my first more serious Home Lab. Your videos helped very much to set it up and thank you for all your work in this videos!
Haven't had a good time to completely overhaul the network, plus I'm working on a few videos experimenting with different setups surrounding IPv6 and routing. Hence the VPN question I just posted also.
nice home lab! I love videos like this. I am wondering - do you know how many power all that stuff consumes ? Maybe you have dedicated power meter for that power line or something? I saw in other video (pi ups) you mentioned that you trying to use ups for all you devices…
Asking cuz almost all that computers are used 24/7 and it may be costly to run all of them continuously. I have one NAS machine and second machine runs docker with self hosted services like Nextcloud, photoprism and sonarr, radarr… NAS configured to spin down disks if they are not used during 30 minutes. Both machines consume up to 30W (total) idle
:) I feel like a lot of the home networking tours on UA-cam are people showing off their cable management, or showing off all brand new equipment. It’s cool and all, but I believe that’s not what most peoples setups are like. I feel like real home networks are a never ending work in progress, so there’s a mix of old and new equipment, and a mix of devices you like and devices that are just ok and do the job. Also, how you mention that labels are in some ways more important than cable management. So true, so true. :) Happy holidays
Nice home lab! I'm not running anything near that elaborate but your setup has given me some ideas. Especially with the TP-Link Cat5 to Fiber adapter. I guess you're using a single mode bi-directional SFP in that thing? I actually work in Telecom these days as a NOC engineer but until that I was a "normal" I.T. guy so the Eve-NG stuff might really be worth taking a look at to help further my knowledge of Layer1 transport. Also i'd be interested in the Proxmox GPU passthrough with Tesla cards if you can make that work. I've seen the stuff that Craft Computing has done but that, to me, doesn't seem like the juice is worth the squeeze with all the hoops he has had to jump through.
Yes, I'm using a bidirectional SFP (not SFP+, just SFP) for the fiber to the attic. I went down the BiDi path since I thought it would be harder to fish a duplex LC through the awful cable path I'm pulling it through, but it turned out to be really easy. I've got a lot of those other suggestions on my todo list, but it takes time to get to all of them.
Cool video! Maybe do a video on fiber in a homelab. I thought single mode fiber was typically only used for long distance but I've recently learned that it's more durable and can make a tighter turn radius. I really wish I had gone with mikrotik. I have omada switches and they're ok, but mikrotik just seems so efficient with their design. The aps are great though.
I actually used single mode fiber to get the very tiny simplex cable, since I bought it pre-terminated and needed to pull the head through very tight holes. It's also a lot easier to find direct burial and outdoor fiber in single mode. Single mode deals with multiple wavelengths a lot better, in my case I'm using a BiDi transceiver pair which uses a different wavelength for each direction on the same fiber. I've been happy with TP-Link's APs, although I have one EAP225-V1 which is old enough to keep me on the V3 controller, so I can't buy any of the newer EAP600 units without going to the newer SDN controller and losing the ability to control the AP I bought a few years ago. So, compatibility across generations has been relatively poor for me, or at least across the line when they went from managed WiFi to managed networking and rewrote seemingly everything.
i think you should build 3-4 lo pwr arm that have nvme and 2.5 and do netfs/clustering/redundant nas, maybe a dedicated sniffer box with 24/7 pkt cap, do ha opnsense and link agg - you are rite about llicensing - good on opnsense - a great product to sell!
I'd love to build a low power cluster where I add nodes as I need more performance rather than adding drives to a big chassis. It's on my radar, getting to it one video at a time.
@@apalrdsadventures yeah I had to do it in OpenStack... I spun up a focal VM and just used their installation script. The docs are really bad, but it did work quite well. It's better doing it that way as the image they provide is based on bionic or at least has been for a very long time.
The closet is drawing about 220W and the table (box PC + Microserver) are drawing about 70W right now. The Mikrotik switch is self-reporting 37W (which I suspect is just PoE load), the fans are barely on. This is more than I'd like but not unreasonable with all of the hardware that's currently running. Nothing really produces that much heat individually, the cluster nodes top out around 40W each at full load (and are passively cooled), the storage server is around 40-50W and that's almost entirely drives, ... but all of it adds up.
@@apalrdsadventures bro, it's stil l great. I run very unusual model of cisco switches, it's great: cheap, has everything I need it to have. But two problems. 1. They are very power hungry. Dual 300W PSU and it idles at around 150W-170W, but at my place it rarely idles. 2. Heat generated by them is unreal. Each utility gets warmer when we use it, but man. It's like a radiator. And I have 4 of them :D Not to mention other hardware. Considering changing to Ubiquity in future, mostly because of heat. It would be cheaper to run as well (less cooling required)
Mikrotik will probably be more familiar with you than Ubiquiti, especially since you can use a CLI if you want and there's no requirement for a controller to use the switch.
@@apalrdsadventures can you do a video of the realtek 2.5 Gbps ethernet usb adapter and it’s half duplex problem? What you recommend then to avoid this problem as I have small mini PCs as part of my proxmox cluster!
Not sure if it's a full video worthy, but I'll try to see what I can put together. Maybe I should try to track down some Aquantia-based models to compare, those seem to be better spec wise.
I like the unvarnished look at a real setup. No RGB.
Even my workstation is mostly RGB-free thankfully
I loved the "normal person's" homelab tour! People on the Internet present their places like a set from Gattaca, usually giving a vibe of something that is too pristine to ever be messed with.
Glad you like it!
I don't remember being compelled to comment in many years, but you got me with the 'Hero of Canton'! my love for you ain't hard to explain...
The Hero of Canton! The man they call Jayne!
GPU Passthrough in Proxmox would be great!
I would like to see how to choose the right MB for that.
Keep the good work and Merry Xmas.
It'll really be more like 'This is the MB I have, and I'll make it work"
And thank you!
@17:23 on the couch being romantic with your girlfriend. J/K it was funny how you were lovingly embracing your PC....LOL Great video this is my new favorite channel. Lik'd and Sub'd
There's been a lot of things PFSense has done that I don't like but not allowing people to sell pre-flashed devices isn't one of them. If I'm not mistaken it's because people were selling devices with modified PFSense installations that were doing nefarious things. Good hygiene is reinstalling your firewall firmware on new hardware anyway - unless it's from a trusted vendor.
It's just the tip of the iceberg of the issues I've had with pfSense and Netgate, so I'm very happy to be rid of them.
@@apalrdsadventures I really like OpenWRT on x86 hardware (have had great results on Qotom boxes). I'm a Linux guy, and there are a ridiculous amount of packages ready to go, and everything can be configured with text files if it isn't available in the GUI (it's Linux :)).
@@apalrdsadventures Would you ever consider doing a blog post or video about your thoughts on pfSense and Netgate? I'm interested in what the issues are.
Nice homelab!
Thank you!
Eve-ng video!
Lmao YOU KNOW WTF WE WANT! Threadripper big daddy virtualization
I know I know I'm working on it, without messing up my normal workstation *too* badly.
Dude! Now I know why I subscribed to your channel. I love networking and I've been so distant from it due to my day-to-day stuff. Just watching your videos for the past hour gets me motivated to get back to what I love doing. I
Your setup is very similar to mine. love that your network isn't way over the top like other UA-camrs that I've seen. There isn't anything wrong with that believe me, but in reality, $$ cost and power consumption are real things.
Anyhow, thank you so much for putting time and energy into putting these videos together. You've motivated me and opened my eyes to what's been missing for a while.
Thanks!
Need to go see if you got a video on the 1-wire setup. If you don't I'd be interested to hear more.
I don't, it's one of my oldest projects that I still use every day. I do have a write-up with pictures www.apalrd.net/projects/2019/onewire/
If you have space in your rack the spacer plate are great to add above your patch panel just for labeling. Since I went with the bigger rack I put a spacer above the PDU too.
I only have 12U and it’s entirely full of stuff, no room for spacers. I do label directly on the patch panel though.
@@apalrdsadventures Ya, my rack is in my shed so I just went with a full open rack. It cost the same as a small closed rack. So I could fill it with spacers that really helped with labeling.
I have same asrock a300, with R5 3400G, and now with 64 gb and 1tb nvme, 1tb of sata ssd and external 1tb of hdd for backups. Running like a beast and covers almost all of my needs, except being a storage appliance, as i would like to have separate trunas system, but cant do it right now , so would highly recommend it.
Also thank for cool videos, could`t do some proxmox shenanigans without you telling us about it!
Glad you like it! Also glad you like the A300 - it's an interesting platform that relies entirely on the CPU's IO controller instead of a chipset.
Uh, I have cable modem/router/ap which draws 11W, "small" eaton 3s 850 ups, printer, pc, single board celeron which replaced raspberry (draws few watts with ssd) and it already looks messy with all the power, usb, lan, audio, video cables.
I'm happy I'm not a youtuber, cause it seems that it's full time job which requires turning half of a basement into server room with 60TB+ of storage over 10Gbit ethernet plus multiple backups, at least two full frame cameras, professional audio gear, ... I didn't expect that much infrastructure in your apartment.
5:27 I do have the Arris S33 cable modem and its small and has two ports a 1Gbps and 2.5Gbps port which is nice. While its still odd shaped, it is thin and small, and is less than 1U wide so can lay flat on a shelf that has only 1U of space.
I missed the part where you talk about Protectli. What part of the video?
Merry Christmas to you and everyone here! Really nice setup and I like the thought behind it. After many raspberry pies for servers nas etc I've built recently in an asrock x300 deskmeet(Barebone) with my old amd 3700x 8c-16th, 64GB @ 3200MHz Ram, 2x8GB WD Red HDDs (for visualized TrueNas) and 1TB M2 for Proxmox my first more serious Home Lab. Your videos helped very much to set it up and thank you for all your work in this videos!
Glad you've enjoyed it!
Bro, hook us up with that video of making the switch a firewall :D
Haven't had a good time to completely overhaul the network, plus I'm working on a few videos experimenting with different setups surrounding IPv6 and routing. Hence the VPN question I just posted also.
nice home lab! I love videos like this. I am wondering - do you know how many power all that stuff consumes ?
Maybe you have dedicated power meter for that power line or something? I saw in other video (pi ups) you mentioned that you trying to use ups for all you devices…
Asking cuz almost all that computers are used 24/7 and it may be costly to run all of them continuously.
I have one NAS machine and second machine runs docker with self hosted services like Nextcloud, photoprism and sonarr, radarr…
NAS configured to spin down disks if they are not used during 30 minutes.
Both machines consume up to 30W (total) idle
Big thumbs up for labels!!!
Forgot to mention it in the video but I use this guy amzn.to/3PPFxfO for labeling
What are you running on your Proxmox cluster?
On the little cluster? It gets reformated roughly every month to make videos lol, but mostly Ceph testing.
I truly believe this is the best home networking tour. Instant sub
Wow thanks! What makes it your favorite?
:)
I feel like a lot of the home networking tours on UA-cam are people showing off their cable management, or showing off all brand new equipment. It’s cool and all, but I believe that’s not what most peoples setups are like. I feel like real home networks are a never ending work in progress, so there’s a mix of old and new equipment, and a mix of devices you like and devices that are just ok and do the job. Also, how you mention that labels are in some ways more important than cable management. So true, so true. :) Happy holidays
Noise!
Thanks!
The hero of Canton the man they call Jayne!
Nice home lab! I'm not running anything near that elaborate but your setup has given me some ideas. Especially with the TP-Link Cat5 to Fiber adapter. I guess you're using a single mode bi-directional SFP in that thing? I actually work in Telecom these days as a NOC engineer but until that I was a "normal" I.T. guy so the Eve-NG stuff might really be worth taking a look at to help further my knowledge of Layer1 transport. Also i'd be interested in the Proxmox GPU passthrough with Tesla cards if you can make that work. I've seen the stuff that Craft Computing has done but that, to me, doesn't seem like the juice is worth the squeeze with all the hoops he has had to jump through.
Yes, I'm using a bidirectional SFP (not SFP+, just SFP) for the fiber to the attic. I went down the BiDi path since I thought it would be harder to fish a duplex LC through the awful cable path I'm pulling it through, but it turned out to be really easy.
I've got a lot of those other suggestions on my todo list, but it takes time to get to all of them.
@@apalrdsadventures No doubt. I've only got ~1000 subs on my little channel and I can't even seem to find time to mess with that as of late.
Cool video! Maybe do a video on fiber in a homelab. I thought single mode fiber was typically only used for long distance but I've recently learned that it's more durable and can make a tighter turn radius. I really wish I had gone with mikrotik. I have omada switches and they're ok, but mikrotik just seems so efficient with their design. The aps are great though.
I actually used single mode fiber to get the very tiny simplex cable, since I bought it pre-terminated and needed to pull the head through very tight holes. It's also a lot easier to find direct burial and outdoor fiber in single mode. Single mode deals with multiple wavelengths a lot better, in my case I'm using a BiDi transceiver pair which uses a different wavelength for each direction on the same fiber.
I've been happy with TP-Link's APs, although I have one EAP225-V1 which is old enough to keep me on the V3 controller, so I can't buy any of the newer EAP600 units without going to the newer SDN controller and losing the ability to control the AP I bought a few years ago. So, compatibility across generations has been relatively poor for me, or at least across the line when they went from managed WiFi to managed networking and rewrote seemingly everything.
i think you should build 3-4 lo pwr arm that have nvme and 2.5 and do netfs/clustering/redundant nas, maybe a dedicated sniffer box with 24/7 pkt cap, do ha opnsense and link agg - you are rite about llicensing - good on opnsense - a great product to sell!
I'd love to build a low power cluster where I add nodes as I need more performance rather than adding drives to a big chassis. It's on my radar, getting to it one video at a time.
merry Christmas. keep it going next year. Loved to see your home network.. hope you get a sponsor for a big UPS ;)
lol thanks, merry Christmas to you as well
Merry Xmas!
Thanks!
Eve-ng is awesome;) Been using it at work for some BGP EVPN labs we want to deploy!
I'll have to make a video about it then! The bare metal install process is brutally odd and poorly described.
@@apalrdsadventures yeah I had to do it in OpenStack... I spun up a focal VM and just used their installation script. The docs are really bad, but it did work quite well. It's better doing it that way as the image they provide is based on bionic or at least has been for a very long time.
Never enough of Homelab tours!
The closet is drawing about 220W and the table (box PC + Microserver) are drawing about 70W right now. The Mikrotik switch is self-reporting 37W (which I suspect is just PoE load), the fans are barely on.
This is more than I'd like but not unreasonable with all of the hardware that's currently running. Nothing really produces that much heat individually, the cluster nodes top out around 40W each at full load (and are passively cooled), the storage server is around 40-50W and that's almost entirely drives, ... but all of it adds up.
@@apalrdsadventures bro, it's stil l great.
I run very unusual model of cisco switches, it's great: cheap, has everything I need it to have. But two problems.
1. They are very power hungry. Dual 300W PSU and it idles at around 150W-170W, but at my place it rarely idles.
2. Heat generated by them is unreal. Each utility gets warmer when we use it, but man. It's like a radiator.
And I have 4 of them :D Not to mention other hardware.
Considering changing to Ubiquity in future, mostly because of heat. It would be cheaper to run as well (less cooling required)
Mikrotik will probably be more familiar with you than Ubiquiti, especially since you can use a CLI if you want and there's no requirement for a controller to use the switch.
Love the Mikrotik switch! I al big fan of these bad boys
It's
@@apalrdsadventures can you do a video of the realtek 2.5 Gbps ethernet usb adapter and it’s half duplex problem? What you recommend then to avoid this problem as I have small mini PCs as part of my proxmox cluster!
Not sure if it's a full video worthy, but I'll try to see what I can put together.
Maybe I should try to track down some Aquantia-based models to compare, those seem to be better spec wise.
@@apalrdsadventures Thanks that will be awesome!