The beginning

I always was fascinated by the homelab community. I think the best way to learn is to practice and there is nothing better that an homelab to practice some IT technical skills. My idea is to self host some services that i enjoy and create some lab environments to train some skills to help me understand some concepts needed to become a better sysadmin and to replicate as well some situations that can happen on a production environment.

Rack choice and assembly

My rack is an Lanberg standard 12U rack that i bought on sales by 100 euros. In my opinion the size is ideal for a small rack to stand by the desk. The assembly was easy and should take less that 30 minutes to assembly a similar rack.

Network

Patch panel

I choose an shielded 24 ports keystone modular patch panel. Shielded patch panels are designed for high EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference) environments. These RJ45 patch panels can protect your high speed network from noise and EMI especially when the copper cables run near power cables.

Switch

When searching for a new switch my requirements were that the devices should be silent, with no fans, manageable, with SNMP, and no less than 1gb ports. On reddit the recommendations were mikrotik, unify and tp link switches, but i found out that unify is very expensive for my budget and TP-Link have some strangers firmware bugs. So, on the PT used market, i bought this Mikrotik CRS326-24G-2S+RM, which contains 24 port Gigabit Ethernet + two SFP ports. It has “Dual boot” feature that allows us choose which operating systemto use, RouterOS or SwOS. If you prefer to have a simplified switch only OS with more switch specific features, use SwOS. If you are used to Winbox and would like the ability to use routing and other Layer 3 features on some ports in your CRS, boot and use RouterOS. You can select the desired operating system from RouterOS, from SwOS or from the RouterBOOT loader settings. I personally have choose SwOS because i don’t need on the switch layer 3 capabilities. I have other device doing the routing and filtering.

Firewall / Router

To do my network segregation i have an zimaboard with 8gb of ram with Opnsense installed. Opnsense is great and i only have nice things to say about this firewall appliance. It is easy to configure, its lightweight and can be installed on almost everything. I choose the zimaboard because was at good price, its silent and has a low power consumption. The main draw is that it has only 2gb interfaces and i plan to upgrade to 4 at least 2.5GB interfaces. But overall i am very happy with my zima.

ISP Modem

On the rack is, as well, my ISP modem. Its standard Huawei fiber modem from Vodafone. I don’t like but i there isn’t much i can do about that.

NAS

Raspberry PI 4

On the Raspberry Pi i have installed openmediavault and a 1tb SSD to serve as small, quiet NAS to backup my google photos and my markdown notes. Openmediavault has many features and it can be natively installed on arm CPUs. For now, for my use case works well, and i don’t feel so dependent from big tech to save my data. I can loose access to my google account without lost access to my files. Which is great. I can sleep better at night :). In the future i will upgrade for a more robust solution, maybe a Synology or a TrueNas build.

UPS

For UPS i have an old gembird ups that i bought used. Its small, but can power supply my rack almost 15 minutes, which more than i need to safely shut down the devices when needed.

#homelab #network #serverrack