https://relvokcor.xyz/~sean/tags/homelab/ Recent content in HomeLab on skj.dev Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us © 2020 Sean Johnson Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://relvokcor.xyz/~sean/posts/ceph-p2/ Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://relvokcor.xyz/~sean/posts/ceph-p2/ Hardware Considerations Like with most Home Lab setups, a lot of success can be tied to having the right hardware for the job. The hard part is finding the right balance. It’s tempting to pick up corporate cast offs of data center servers for pennies on the dollar, but that stuff is built to be in a data center, not in a house. While I like having a small rack for my gear, except for the Cisco switch, it’s all shelves. https://relvokcor.xyz/~sean/posts/ceph-p1/ Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://relvokcor.xyz/~sean/posts/ceph-p1/ The Problem With Storage One of the biggest Home Lab challenges is storage. The Home Lab is ideally a microcosm of a larger, organization financed, infrastructure. Many components nicely scale down to the home. Multi core Xeon servers with hundreds of Gigs of RAM can be represented by Intel NUCs and Raspberry Pis. Networking gear can be exactly the same in the case of managed switches, and pfSense can provide sophisticated firewall services while running on a much smaller box. https://relvokcor.xyz/~sean/posts/home-lab-v2/ Thu, 19 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://relvokcor.xyz/~sean/posts/home-lab-v2/ Many years ago I decided to start a Home Lab with a collection of NUCs. At the time I was interested in brushing up my VMware skills, so I did the VMUG Advantage thing (which is a great deal, BTW) and ran a vSphere cluster. As the usefulness of VMware waned for me I transformed it into a Kubernetes cluster. I fully acknowledge how silly that may seem, but I tend to learn best by doing, which really means “by breaking”. https://relvokcor.xyz/~sean/posts/a-tale-of-two-homelabs/ Fri, 01 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://relvokcor.xyz/~sean/posts/a-tale-of-two-homelabs/ And then the dinosaurs came… In one of my previous jobs I worked for a small tech company where approximately half of the employees worked remotely. I was one of those remotes, and perhaps one day I’ll write up my thoughts on being a remote employee. From having worked in larger companies, I was used to having a playground area that I could use as a learning tool. The small tech company didn’t have such an environment, which made sense in their case.