My Homelab Upgrade 23'

So here we go again, another year, another upgrade. Lots of things have changed since my last post in 21’ so buckle up!

What’s New #

You probably still could recall the shabby ikea shoe rack from the previous episode. While it barely held the metal pieces together, the base plate has bended significantly under heavy load over just a few months and probably won’t last any longer. There was also no room left to stack another device so the extensibility also took a hit. Well, it’s a free shoe rack after all.

While I was thinking about getting a proper rack, I started to notice service degradation on the software layer as well. As the number of self-hosted services increased, the effort of maintenance skyrocketed. All services, no matter ESXi/vCenter or Kubernetes, Prometheus or Ubiqiti, had crashed one after another in some most unexpected ways. For example, vCenter was first installed on a USB drive to free up some SSD space. However, it never occurred to me that the flash chips in the thumb drive was so fragile that it bricked in a month under heavy writes (probably due to system logging or swap). I had to reinstall vcenter and reconfigure all the VMs and vSwitches. While I learnt a great deal in the endless chase of troubleshooting, sysadmin work simply took too much of my time rendered little time left for the real hacks.

DIY Rack #

• sg too pricy

• what parts do you need

• how to buy parts from taobao and build it

• patch panel

Networking #

• Switch Upgrade
• Tailscale with Caddy

Power Supply #

Compute Node #

nuc case add on macbook

Software & Services #

• prometheus -> datadog
• k8s -> nomad
• google analytics -> plausible
• Periodic backup