I’ve been occupied with home improvement projects lately, and writing up my thoughts on those can be arduous, given that I’m an HVACR nerd and want to get into the math on everything.
So this is a palate cleanser for me. A short, low-effort post, that will show a snapshot of what I’ve got going on as of December-ish 2023. Before I get into a new round of upgrades to my digital life.
Current setup:
Not a whole lot has changed recently. Jellyfin gets the most use by far. Since getting it onto a subdomain, I use it to stream music in the car. Most services are too expensive and don’t have things I like, and Soundcloud doesn’t have the classic albums that I keep going back to.
Minecraft servers are still up, but hardly ever get used. The boys are more into Valheim lately. I’m waiting for them to ask about setting up a server for that instead.
I added an Immich instance, which is not documented on the diagram currently. We had a Pixel 5a screen die over the summer with tens of gigs of photos on it. It’s now been repaired, and needs a good backup solution before we give it to one of the kids (whoever has the oldest phone currently). I’m not sure if I want to rely on Immich just yet. A new version was just pushed and they are keeping the notes up about updates potentially breaking your install. So I’m holding off on that for now until the devs think it’s stable.
From top to bottom:
- 1 – patch panel
- 2L – Cisco 3560CX multi-gig POE+ switch. The backbone of the network.
- 2R – TP-Link Omada ER-605 Router. I wish I had gotten one with SFP to try and delete my AT&T router.
- 3 – TP-Link Omada TL-SG2428 24-port gigabit L2+ switch with 4x SFP. I wish I had sprung for multi-gig SFP+ ports for a fiber backbone to an upstairs switch.
- 3-4R – Banana Pi Pro. Running PiHole since it’s got GbE.
- 4-6 – My main franken-server
- 7 – Some spare HDDs. A HDD flapping in the breeze on a USB-SATA converter (to be upgraded to hot swap bays)
- 8-9 – TrippLite SMART3000RM2U. Swapped the fan to 2x Noctua fans (1 in regular slot, additional 3D print mount in front of the transformer). When everything is idling I end up pulling about 7% of the rated capacity of this thing. Runs on its own dedicated wiring and 30A breaker.
Future work:
Install Sunshine onto my gaming/CAD tower. Install Moonlight onto my laptop and the mini PC on the large TV. The new D2R season starts any minute, and I haven’t played regularly in 2 seasons and would like to make a new smiter or nova sorc.
Install a 2x 2.5in hot swap bay into the server. I’m wary of R/W operations, and don’t let home surveilance use my main 8TB ZFS pool. It’s using its own 250GB HDD that’s currently plugged into a USB3-SATA adapter with hardware passthrough. I have a 3.5″ floppy bay in the server that’s unused and already bought the bay for me for christmas. It will keep my drive protected, and give me an additional bay to support quicker backups in the future.
Assess the space limitations in the case while I’m in there, and see about installing a Tesla GPU. I’d like to pass through a little something into different VMs/containers to allow hardware transcoding in ZoneMinder and Immitch. And play with migrating my current gaming machine into a VM. But I think I’ll have to modify a HDD bracket to give me the length required inside the case where that PCIe slot falls. This is precisely what Cardboard Assisted Design (CAD) is for.
Create redundancy for PiHole on my server. DNS is dead when I have to reboot the Banana Pi. Do the same for Wireguard onto the Pi, because that dies when I need to reboot the main server. We’ll see if that 10+ year old system on chip (SoC) can handle encryption at gigabit speeds… I’m not holding my breath.
Wire up the girl’s bedroom. She’s got a desktop now with a big screen for drawing, and shouldn’t need to rely on a USB-WiFi adapter anymore. Maybe install a dumb switch in the linen closet ceiling, so I can add 2x ports to each upstairs bedroom without running so much Cat6a. Preferably with SFP so I could run a 10G fiber trunk line to that node.
Get a SFP-10G copper module and hook up the server to my nice Cisco switch for better throughput. If anything is saturating a single gigabit port, it’s that. And I’m too lazy to mess with link aggregation on the 2nd NIC for a measly 2x speed increase. May as well go all the way and do that one right.
Potentially migrate this site to Hugo. WordPress is currently running in a docker container with the database and php. If it dies, sometimes bringing it back up messes up the photos in the database. If anyone has noticed posts going missing or posts with broken images, that’s why. I had 2 unexpected reboots in the last year, and had to copy/paste the post text into a text editor, restore the LXC container from backup, then re-create the post and re-upload the images again. Not fun. And everything here is static anyways. So I’m not sure if the migration work is worth it. I’m finally figuring things out like LaTeX plugins, and don’t want to learn again.
That’s it for now. I’ve got about 6 posts in progress that were low-threat and got stomped on by more important projects. So hopefully I can wrap those up, clean up the messes left from them, and get my thoughts onto pages soon.
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