Homelab news!
Life has been.... interesting. I got sidetracked with some business ventures I am still working but here goes nothing as it were.
I HATED the 3M taping the pre existing cases to a shelf arrangement, got the parts to fix my 3D printer (new replacement hot ends and heating cartriges as the old ones got badly boogered up) and banged out the shelves. Got the parts to fix my eSATA enclosure, got a fifth Pi5 8Gb so here is the arrangement as it sits NOW...
5 @ Pi5s all matching, official coolers, Pimoroni NVME bases, 2TB NVMEs which are way bigger than need be, 3D printed rack and trays, 90 degree USB C elbows and official power supplies. The modular rack mount and the trays for the Raspberry Pi 5 with Pimoroni NVME base with the mounting holes moved back 2mm due to the pimoroni NVME base sticking out too far forward of the PI board. I printed 6 but have 5 pis. I meant to print a blank tray but goofed. Might fix it, might leave it, might get a sixth Pi if budget plays nice down the road..
All Pis are CURRENTLY loaded with Raspberry Pi OS lite 64 bit and are members of a docker swarm. I was talking about loading the Pis with Rocky Linux 10 as my whole purpose behind this homelab is to stay up to date with what I will see in an enterprise environment as closely as possible. Might just convert my Pi5 16gb desktop to Rocky and leave the cluster nodes as is... OR I could just run Rocky 10 a Hyper-V VM on my Windows 11 desktop (GMKtec K11).
The "NAS host" of the Raspberry Pi 4B was orphaned in favor salvaging an old PC with an external 8 bay eSATA enclsoure and controller. A stack of 1 and 2TB SATA HDDs give me effecitvely 9TB of storage in a pair of ZFS Z1 pools. (RAID 5 ish...)
The old PC is right now housed in a generic ATX case with an MSI 970A-G43 mainboard, AMD FX 8350 8 core processor, 32GB Crucial DDR3, a 1TB SATA SSD, MSI Radeon 7450, 10GTek PCIe eSATA ASMedia ASM1061 controller, YuanLe Realtek chip PCIe 2.5Gb ethernet controller. So basic ish... The eSATA card and ethernet controller are new as the original eSATA controller is no longer compatible with Linux... Been that way a long time which is why I orphaned it years ago. Got it going again so where we are.
I had to replace the eSATA to SATA internal cable on the enclosure and a new set of cables. The original cable got bent over and broke both the cable end and the internal cable inner bits. Working now...
I pulled all the matching hard disks I could salvage from old PC projects, managed to come up with 4 2TB Seagate SATA drives for bays 1-4, and 2 1TB Seagate, and 2 1TB Western Digital SATA drives for bays 5-8.
Got OpenMediaVault installed, and got it configured for ZFS, configured the drives into 2 ZFS Z1 pools, and as drive sizes according to the OS do NOT match the labels ever, I ended up with 5.16 and 2.56TB respectively in the Z1 pools.
Created my NFS shares to the cluster and other Linux hosts, and SMB shares to the Windows boxes on my network.
The data from the existing Jellyfin server has been copied over to /DATA1 on the OMV box, and I will be learning how to use the shared NFS storage as shared cluster storage for a Jellyfin server FIRST.
I did some major rework to my network as well...
Frontier had a promo, my price for 1GB fiber was about to go up to $79.99 /month, and the 2GB fiber was on promo, $64.99 month for the first 2 months then $69.99 / month for 3 years... So I am saving $10.00 / month by doubling my speed and getting new routers that can handle 5GB...
Upgraded my network switches to 2.5GB ethernet, and will likely at some point down the road add 2.5Gb USB 3.0 ethernet dongles to the Pis...
Ripped out every mm of category 5 and 5e cable in my rack and at my switches (in the walls has been Cat6 for a long time now...) and moved entirely to Cat6, custom length cable so if I move anything I am hosed...
My projects left are...
[*]Get a proper backup and restore solution going. I am NOT going to rely on Windows Backup and OneDrive! I believe I can setup URbackup on the OMV server just need to drill into that some more.
[*]Configure URbackup to use S3 Glacier buckets for offsite backup and restore storage.
[*]Get at least ONE instance of Rocky 10 going.
[*]Get the currently unsued Pi4B setup as PiHole / local DNS server so I can name resolve my local domain without manually distributing hosts files.
[*]Get kubernetes clustering going where I can share an app to both my hosts, AND expose it to the internet via my VPN.
[*]Get a SAMBA domain controller going
[*]Join the Windows hosts to the samba doman
[*]Figure out how to get the OMV SAMBA shares on the domain
[*]Centralize auth for Windows and Linux boxes.
[*]Get Grafana working correctly and giving me a pretty monitoring dashboard
[*]Figure out how to move running containers between nodes so I can bring a node down for patching, and add that to my cluster patching scripts.
[*]When it cools down this fall, get my HVAC guy back over here and finish running that duct into the data closet
I am certain I am missing quite a bit here, but for now, this will do...
Life has been.... interesting. I got sidetracked with some business ventures I am still working but here goes nothing as it were.
I HATED the 3M taping the pre existing cases to a shelf arrangement, got the parts to fix my 3D printer (new replacement hot ends and heating cartriges as the old ones got badly boogered up) and banged out the shelves. Got the parts to fix my eSATA enclosure, got a fifth Pi5 8Gb so here is the arrangement as it sits NOW...
5 @ Pi5s all matching, official coolers, Pimoroni NVME bases, 2TB NVMEs which are way bigger than need be, 3D printed rack and trays, 90 degree USB C elbows and official power supplies. The modular rack mount and the trays for the Raspberry Pi 5 with Pimoroni NVME base with the mounting holes moved back 2mm due to the pimoroni NVME base sticking out too far forward of the PI board. I printed 6 but have 5 pis. I meant to print a blank tray but goofed. Might fix it, might leave it, might get a sixth Pi if budget plays nice down the road..
All Pis are CURRENTLY loaded with Raspberry Pi OS lite 64 bit and are members of a docker swarm. I was talking about loading the Pis with Rocky Linux 10 as my whole purpose behind this homelab is to stay up to date with what I will see in an enterprise environment as closely as possible. Might just convert my Pi5 16gb desktop to Rocky and leave the cluster nodes as is... OR I could just run Rocky 10 a Hyper-V VM on my Windows 11 desktop (GMKtec K11).
The "NAS host" of the Raspberry Pi 4B was orphaned in favor salvaging an old PC with an external 8 bay eSATA enclsoure and controller. A stack of 1 and 2TB SATA HDDs give me effecitvely 9TB of storage in a pair of ZFS Z1 pools. (RAID 5 ish...)
The old PC is right now housed in a generic ATX case with an MSI 970A-G43 mainboard, AMD FX 8350 8 core processor, 32GB Crucial DDR3, a 1TB SATA SSD, MSI Radeon 7450, 10GTek PCIe eSATA ASMedia ASM1061 controller, YuanLe Realtek chip PCIe 2.5Gb ethernet controller. So basic ish... The eSATA card and ethernet controller are new as the original eSATA controller is no longer compatible with Linux... Been that way a long time which is why I orphaned it years ago. Got it going again so where we are.
I had to replace the eSATA to SATA internal cable on the enclosure and a new set of cables. The original cable got bent over and broke both the cable end and the internal cable inner bits. Working now...
I pulled all the matching hard disks I could salvage from old PC projects, managed to come up with 4 2TB Seagate SATA drives for bays 1-4, and 2 1TB Seagate, and 2 1TB Western Digital SATA drives for bays 5-8.
Got OpenMediaVault installed, and got it configured for ZFS, configured the drives into 2 ZFS Z1 pools, and as drive sizes according to the OS do NOT match the labels ever, I ended up with 5.16 and 2.56TB respectively in the Z1 pools.
Created my NFS shares to the cluster and other Linux hosts, and SMB shares to the Windows boxes on my network.
The data from the existing Jellyfin server has been copied over to /DATA1 on the OMV box, and I will be learning how to use the shared NFS storage as shared cluster storage for a Jellyfin server FIRST.
I did some major rework to my network as well...
Frontier had a promo, my price for 1GB fiber was about to go up to $79.99 /month, and the 2GB fiber was on promo, $64.99 month for the first 2 months then $69.99 / month for 3 years... So I am saving $10.00 / month by doubling my speed and getting new routers that can handle 5GB...
Upgraded my network switches to 2.5GB ethernet, and will likely at some point down the road add 2.5Gb USB 3.0 ethernet dongles to the Pis...
Ripped out every mm of category 5 and 5e cable in my rack and at my switches (in the walls has been Cat6 for a long time now...) and moved entirely to Cat6, custom length cable so if I move anything I am hosed...
My projects left are...
[*]Get a proper backup and restore solution going. I am NOT going to rely on Windows Backup and OneDrive! I believe I can setup URbackup on the OMV server just need to drill into that some more.
[*]Configure URbackup to use S3 Glacier buckets for offsite backup and restore storage.
[*]Get at least ONE instance of Rocky 10 going.
[*]Get the currently unsued Pi4B setup as PiHole / local DNS server so I can name resolve my local domain without manually distributing hosts files.
[*]Get kubernetes clustering going where I can share an app to both my hosts, AND expose it to the internet via my VPN.
[*]Get a SAMBA domain controller going
[*]Join the Windows hosts to the samba doman
[*]Figure out how to get the OMV SAMBA shares on the domain
[*]Centralize auth for Windows and Linux boxes.
[*]Get Grafana working correctly and giving me a pretty monitoring dashboard
[*]Figure out how to move running containers between nodes so I can bring a node down for patching, and add that to my cluster patching scripts.
[*]When it cools down this fall, get my HVAC guy back over here and finish running that duct into the data closet
I am certain I am missing quite a bit here, but for now, this will do...
Statistics: Posted by dbhosttexas — Mon Jul 07, 2025 3:28 am