Posts tagged #homelab on Dynamo Geeks: 17 posts from the community, most useful first.
After greybeard_graham's tweet ("a backup you have never restored is a rumour") I feel personally attacked, so last weekend I finally do a real restore test. Not "I see the files in B2", a real restore to a new VM, start the apps, use them. Result: 3 OK, 2 broken. Nothing was lost because the originals are fine, but if the NAS died last month, I would lose all my scanned documents. Here is the story. The setup…
I write Django for a startup in Berlin, from Guwahati. The Brahmaputra view from my window is lovely. The broadband is not. After three years, here is my setup and what it has survived. Medium length, because my UPS only gives me so much time. The connections Primary: local fibre, 100 Mbps on paper, 60 to 80 in reality, very stable when it works. Backup: a 5G fixed wireless box from a different operator (Jio…
Reminder from an old man who has seen things: a backup you have never restored is not a backup. It is a rumour. Cheers, G.
Rainy season in HCMC. Some weeks we have 2-3 power cuts, 10 to 40 minutes. My APC Back-UPS 1000VA can run my 186W lab for ~18 minutes (UPS says), so for long cuts everything must shut down cleanly by itself, even when I am at work or asleep. This is how I do it with NUT (Network UPS Tools). Plan The UPS USB cable goes to one machine. That machine is the NUT primary (server) All other machines are secondary (clients)…
Problem: when my parents watch something on the phone, Jellyfin transcode on CPU and the i5-8500T go to 95%, fans loud, and everything else on that node become slow. The iGPU (UHD 630) was sitting there doing nothing. It took me 2 evenings to make Quick Sync work inside an unprivileged LXC, so here is everything. 1. Check the host ls -l /dev/dri crw-rw---- 1 root video 226, 0 ... card0 crw-rw---- 1 root render 226,…
Every few weeks someone on here tells me the cloud is cheaper. Sometimes it is. So I sat down with a pot of tea, my power bill, and my receipts, and worked it out properly. I have included the numbers that do not flatter me, because a comparison that only counts one side is an advertisement. What is in the spare room One Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro, i5-8500T, 32GB, running Proxmox. About a dozen containers and two…
G'day legends. This took three weekends, two trips to Jaycar and one very long conversation with the wife about "what exactly is a control plane". Years ago Jeff Geerling's Pi Dramble videos put the idea in my head and it never left, so if you've not seen the original, start here: This is the full log. Every command I ran, everything that went wrong, and at the end an honest answer to "should you build one". Parts…
Last month one of my 8TB drives die at 2am on a Tuesday. Nothing was lost, because ZFS mirror, but I learn a few things that I want to write down before I forget. The pool TrueNAS SCALE, one pool called tank , 4 × 8TB in two mirror vdevs . Each mirror is one WD Red Plus + one Seagate IronWolf, bought from different shops in different months, so they are not from the same batch. TrueNAS does this in the UI, but this…
Howzit. A few people asked after my comment in the homelab thread, so here's the long version. Ja, it's long. Make tea. Context for the non-South Africans: for a few years "load shedding" was just life here. Scheduled power cuts, two to four hours at a time, sometimes three times a day, announced by stage (stage 2, stage 4, stage 6 when things were really bad). You planned your cooking, your gym, your deploys and…
booked a prod migration for thursday 18:00 and caught myself opening EskomSePush to check the schedule first. the trauma still decides my change windows. the inverter beeped once while i was typing this and i nearly rolled back out of reflex
Few people asked after my air raid deploy post how a normal day looks. So here is one. Not the worst day, not the best. Tuesday. I work remote for a Danish company, Go and Postgres, team of 6. Kyiv is one hour ahead of Copenhagen, which is the only easy part. 06:40 Wake up, before coffee I check the outage schedule in the energy company app and in our district Telegram channel. Kyiv is split in groups, my building…
Many people ask in my Self Hosted topic "what do you actually run", so here is the full tour. It start 4 years ago as one old laptop under the TV. Now it is a 12U wall cabinet in the corner of our spare room, and my wife call it "the heater". Hardware pve1, pve2: Lenovo M720q Tiny, i5-8500T, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe each. Bought second hand, very good value pve3: HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini, i5-8500T, 32GB, 512GB NVMe NAS:…
In 1997 I took a job looking after the systems at a mid-sized firm in Hobart. On my first day the office manager walked me round, pointed under a desk in accounts at a beige tower with a handwritten sign taped to it, and said: "That one runs payroll. Nobody touches it." The sign said DO NOT TURN OFF in capitals and was signed by a man who had left the company two years earlier. It was a NetWare 3.12 server. It had…
For thirty-four years I carried some form of pager. First an actual pager, a Motorola thing on my belt that went off in the middle of my sister's wedding speeches in 1997 (a Novell server, naturally). Then a Nokia, then a BlackBerry, then whatever the company issued and the on-call app that screamed like a smoke alarm. I retired eleven months ago and I want to write down a few things nobody told me, because some of…
G'day legends. Went through the shed drawer on the weekend and counted seven dead microSD cards, all out of Pis that run 24/7. The weather station, the chook house door, the Pi-hole, the garage camera. Every one died the same way: fine for months, then one morning it boots read-only or doesn't boot at all. Parts I use now (AUD, roughly): second hand 120GB SATA SSD ($20 at the tip shop / marketplace), a USB 3 to SATA…
