Posts tagged homelab

Travel NAS 2024

Last year I made up my mind to move away from Austin and sell all of my belongings, though I swear I’m not a minimalist. This included my homelab. However I still wanted to keep my data with me and ruled out cloud storage or a simple portable hard drive. I wanted a portable NAS for resilliency and I’ve grown to like TrueNAS.

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Custom Fabricated Rack 2022

I got a couple of items that warranted rewiring my TV cabinet rack: StarTech extenders and P-Link server rails. I inverted the extenders so I could recess the patch panel and switch, making room for the SFP modules and fiber cables. I can’t believe I can’t find any right angle adapters for the LC/UPC fiber patch cables!

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Custom Fabricated Rack 2020

Having my equipment hidden in a TV cabinet was all fine and well but after a while I got the server rack itch. So during the pandemic I learned Fusion 360 and made my own custom 10u rack posts. It turned out nicer than I expected! 3D models are available here: Robpol86/TV-Cabinet-Rack-Posts

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TV Cabinet Rack 2017

I replaced my super cool Dell rack recently with a more normal-looking setup in my living room. After countless weeks looking for the right TV cabinet I finally found one deep enough to house a couple of 2U rackmount cases and a rackmount switch. It turned out nicer than I had expected! Don’t ask me how much all this cost.

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Dell Rack 2016

My server rack cabinet at home. Built my own router and zip tied a keystone panel so pulling out my rack doesn’t involve disconnecting my speaker wire. Listen to https://youtu.be/WPDZoOKX8ag to hear how much noise this puts out (not really that much). For pix of the underside look at last year’s gallery.

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Bareos Tape Backup on a 124T

I use Bareos (a fork of Bacula) to backup my data at home from a Linux computer to tape. Backing up to tape is a lot more convenient that backing up to DVD-R/BD-R, though it’s probably debatable when compared to backing up to an external hard drive. But having a tape autoloader is so cool!

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Dell Rack 2015

My server rack cabinet at home. Removed everything from it, cleaned and dusted it, and installed only the things I’m using.

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Dell Rack 2013

Taken after finally re-wiring it and setting it up after moving to San Francisco. I only took one photo of it :(

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Dell Rack 2012

After over a whole year since receiving it I have finally made full use of my rack and transferred all of my computers and equipment to it.

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Dell Rack 2011

Ever since I took a Cisco CCNA class back in high school in 2002 I’ve always wanted a rack at home. I even bought one on Craigslist in 2007 for $100 but it had round holes and it was very shallow. Turns out it was meant for music equipment.

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