HomeLab Tour - A Dive Into My Weird & Wonderful HomeLab!

[@28469]

Mate, the quantity of QUALITY videos you're pumping out is amazing, please keep it up. Much love

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, really appreciate your support.

[@godelrt]

Really enjoyed this ! Thank you !

[@Jims-Garage]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@Doesntcompute2k]

i don't believe anyone CARES what your homelab looks like, as long as YOU like it, can use it, make use of it, and are generating some great content, as you constantly are! I for one applaud you on your presentation, Mr. Game Show Host. :) I would LOVE to see you do a (yearly?) hardware and software video, ala Techno Tim's, of what you use hardware-wise and software-wise. Two videos, if needed, one if you can weld it all together. I'm the guy with three (main) racks, two large secondary wire racks (old DEC VAXen, Alphas, SGIs, HPs, IBMs, SUNs that I cannot/will not part with), and then a few (uhmmm okay five) smaller desktop racks of routers/switches/firewalls. It's a labor of love for sure. As you get things put together, I encourage you to checkout Reddit's r/Homelab and r/HomeDataCenter subs. They love picture and diagram postings on r/Homelab.

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks for the kind words, you're totally right! Wow, what a setup you have. Sounds like I need to see a walkthrough of yours for some inspiration! What are you doing with all of that?

[@NetBandit70]

Thanks for keeping it real. Interesting lab.

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, it's not perfect but it's mine!

[@Clarence-Homelab]

Well done on the homelab tour video!

[@Jims-Garage]

Cheers, so much still to do!

[@chrisumali9841]

Thanks for the demo and info, have a great day

[@Jims-Garage]

You're welcome, Chris!

[@TheStevenWhiting]

I like the thumbnail. Like an 80s cabaret show :)

[@Jims-Garage]

Haha, thanks!

[@sturdyblock]

Jim's Garage... It's almost Halloween...

[@Jims-Garage]

It's a harrowing sight, I know 😂

[@kevinhughes9801]

Great setup thanks for sharing keep up brill vids

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, Kevin 🙂

[@baggerz896]

Jim. Nice work. From Josh after 4 drinks. Cheers

[@Jims-Garage]

Cheers, in more ways than one 🍻

[@fearthesmeag]

That was quality James - always wondered what was behind your camera. I thought my home lab was in a state - albeit, its a 15u sitting in the corner of the living room. And love your content man, we need more Brtitish homelaber channels - too many Americans ;)

[@Jims-Garage]

Haha, thanks. Was going for a phoenix night's Gerry Sinclair vibe 😉

[@pantoqwerty]

The thing I don’t like about the US home-labbers is that they have too much access to good kit. Struggle to even get decent cases.

[@cybr774]

Very nice homelab!

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, it ain't pretty but it's mine

[@TheStevenWhiting]

15:16 we have that at work. Primary sonicwall and secondary sonicwall.

[@Jims-Garage]

Nice. Yes, pretty common for Enterprise to run in parallel for redundancy and load balancing.

[@huunhantran010]

amazing build!!

[@Jims-Garage]

Thank you!

[@chrisjchalifoux]

I love your homelab set up and your videos to

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, Chris. Appreciated.

[@draukuxan1081]

Thanks for sharing a walk through of your homelab setup! This is very similar to what mine looks like, but yours has much more "modern" hardware... I only have 1Gbit networking, two HP z800 workstations as the main 'servers' and several lenovo/dell 1-liter pc's as additional nodes. Networked storage is served with a QNAP ts451+ NAS as main, then a Synology ds413j as the backup for that. Very old hardware that still works for most of everything I want to do. The only upgrades I could begin to "stress" would be faster networking. I use OPNsense under Proxmox as my virtual router, and your idea of setting up HA firewalls is something I will be doing as soon as I get a managed switch. I normally use Docker containers for all services that I can, and manage those containers through the terminal with my custom docker scripts, and sometimes use Portainer. As far as apps in the homelab, I use Pteradactyl or LGSM for gameserver management, the typical media-stack with Plex / Jellyfin + media organization apps, and I just spun up a k3s cluster to start playing with kubernetes.

[@Jims-Garage]

Hey, that's a cool setup, a lot going on there! Managed switches are a good investment, albeit not essential. Pterodactyl is something I've considered previously but I'm always torn between it and just hosting it in k3s. I will probably do a video on it because it deserves some more love considering the effort that has gone into creating it. I'm going to move onto kubernetes in the near future.

[@try-that]

Nice setup, Unifi does seem to be in most homelab, and yes I have a couple of Unifi switches 😁 I really don't know much about kubernetes, I' still learning things about docker. I see lots of people are using scale, but I still prefer OMV for a JBOD system, plus it can do both docker and vms. Looking forward to more videos

[@chriswiggins3896]

Very cool dual "router/firewall" setup. All you need to have full redundancy is a 2nd ISP. Very cool setup, nice to see a real life homelab and not one that was all done up for the camera :D.

[@Jims-Garage]

Haha, thanks. I'm Very much for the analogue approach

[@settlece]

yours look like the Ritz i use round Floor Scrubber Pads as air filters

[@Jims-Garage]

Nothing wrong with that, if it works it works!

[@totoro1596]

hey Jim appreciate the detailed and humble homelab tour! re: 12:30, could you link the the stream (and timestamp) where you mentioned you took down your main node (Dell) and maintained uptime? One thing I'm a bit unsure about is how that would work for k3s and longhorn, because if your Dell node went down, you'd be left with 1/3 (master) nodes for k3s and 1/3 nodes for longhorn - which to my understanding would put etcd and your volumes in read-only mode?

[@bluesquadron593]

You can have a small Proxmox node just to provide the quorum. It does not need to do anything else.

[@Jims-Garage]

I think after reading it's just the corosync that's required.

[@raul230285]

Cool

[@Dreamwoodinternational]

Lovely video, and never be ashamed of your Lab/Shack. I'm wondering if your rack is 'server size' i.e. extra deep for the R730? Mine started with a number of Amateur radios and just a workstation PC - oh and UPS, Mikrotik router, Mikrotik switch, patch panel, NAS, BlueIris PC (for cameras) in a 42RU (600mm x 600mm).😀 Now I've been bitten by the HomeLab bug thanks to your brilliant series and am angling for Server(s)! Still coming to terms with turning off Firewall in the Mikrotik router and going to Sophos XG virtual(s). Kubernetes sounds like 'Nirvana' - bring on the tutorial.

[@Jims-Garage]

Haha, thanks. Luckily my rack is depth adjustable so it accommodates my r730 without issue. I'm currently putting things on extendable shelves so that also helps with rails etc.

[@kgottsman]

You don't need a full blown server for proper Proxmox HA (3 nodes). I use a small VM on my Synology running Corosync and helps to provide quorum. I've use a Raspberry Pi before as well.

[@Jims-Garage]

Good to know, I thought I had read it needs 3 for VM failover but it makes sense that it's just the corosync.

[@bluesquadron593]

I just saw this comment :) Same a mine. You can fence over the node not to try to move anything to it.

[@kevin___]

What made you use RAID2? That seems an interesting choice.

[@Jims-Garage]

For TrueNAS? It's raidz2. I originally had 8x8TB, then added another 6x16TB in raidz2. Means any array can have 2 failures before data loss

[@kevin___]

@@Jims-Garage Ah, I must have misheard. I thought you said RAID 2. My bad!

[@khanhthedag7269]

It look a lot of things 🙂, but it very nice all your tutorial. A question about to give IP for sophos xg and proxmox node. Proxmox Dell and Proxmox Asus have not the same IP range from sophos xg firewall, right? or muss on the same IP range linke firewall?

[@Jims-Garage]

They're both on the same vlan. Dell is 192.168.200.75 and Asus is 192.168.200.76

[@khanhthedag7269]

ok. great. so, I try as follows: first, I install new Proxmox 1 (192.168.100.50), than Proxmox 2 (192.168.100.51). on Proxmox 1, create3 VM for sophos (192.168.1.1) passiv. on Proxmox 2, create3 VM for sophos (192.168.1.2) aktiv. Than, on sophos, I create VLAN with ID 999 (port_B_WAN). On Switch, I give Port 1,2 and 3 the ID 999. Is that right? can I do so?@@Jims-Garage

[@khanhthedag7269]

I have problem. How can I change Proxmox IP in vlan IP ? because: VM sophos is on Proxmox node. Ho can I change exists IP in new vlan IP ? I don't understand, how to do. Please show this step. (e.g like you (Dell und Asus)).

[@Jims-Garage]

@@khanhthedag7269 on Proxmox head to /etc/interfaces and change the IP to static

[@khanhthedag7269]

You have spoken about vlan of Promox. (Dell an Asus on same vlan 192.168.200.75 and 192.168.200.76) but how can I do this? You mean, I must define first in Sophos XG the VLAN ID 200 for Proxmox? than will automaticly Proxmox host turn to vlan IP?@@Jims-Garage

[@mish2k]

Great video and really envying you, wondering if the bricks are real or not tho 😂

[@Jims-Garage]

Rest assured, it's a genuine garage with real bricks (some which are 150 years old)

[@davysprocket]

Do you have a Q device set up for your 2 node Proxmox cluster?

[@Jims-Garage]

I don't , but I'm not actually using any failover at the moment. I'll likely just spin up a corosync pod in Kubernetes to solve it.

[@davysprocket]

That makes sense! I've been scared to try this with my two proxmox hosts so far, but that makes a lot of sense. I use docker but I have enough instances of that to boot up a quick q device to recover the cluster if anything should go wrong@@Jims-Garage

[@InsaiyanTech]

What quads nics would you recommend for 2.5gs nic by any chance I see a few for 80$ but they are Realtek I think

[@Jims-Garage]

Sorry, I don't know much about 2.5Gbe as none of my devices support it. How about 10Gb with something like a mellanox connect-x 3?

[@InsaiyanTech]

@@Jims-Garage oh ok ya I saw they had the 2.5. For cheaper so I was going to just get 2.5 but that 10g one ima get though since there cheap

[@rudypieplenbosch6752]

Good you were not ashamed to show your lab, although i prefer things a bit more organised 😉

[@Jims-Garage]

Haha, I'll tidy it, I promise!

[@rudypieplenbosch6752]

@@Jims-Garage But you clearly know your stuff, i like the way you present.

[@urzaaaaa]

I am thinking about the setup, you have two proxmox machines that run kubernetes VMs. But what happens when one is down and maybe it was the one that had two k3s masters on it, so only one k3s master and one worker is up. Is it sufficient fork3s to keep working?

[@Jims-Garage]

Yes, you can even run Kubernetes on a single node with all 3 roles. In an ideal world I'd have a 3 Proxmox cluster with VM failover across nodes. Perhaps if a kind sponsor wants to help me out 😜

[@sebasdt2103]

I've got one question about Kubernetes(k3s) and databases. On Reddit I read that it's a bad idea to set databases on there due to corruption. What other options are out there?

[@Jims-Garage]

Yea, and no. It depends completely on your architecture. Try telling Netflix it's a bad idea ... but in a Homelab unless you know what you are doing it can be bad. The reason they might have said that is due to readwritemany (typically in a Homelab you want readwriteonce). This restricts writing from to only one container, this helps with corruption. It's a very difficult question to answer without specific context though. Fyi, I've run databases in readwriteonce for a couple of years without issue.

[@try-that]

Nice setup, Unifi does seem to be in most homelab, and yes I have a couple of Unifi switches 😁 I really don't know much about kubernetes, I' still learning things about docker. I see lots of people are using scale, but I still prefer OMV for a JBOD system, plus it can do both docker and vms. Looking forward to more videos

[@sebasdt2103]

@@Jims-Garage I run a simple game server manager called Pterodactyl for my friends. the site uses Mariadb for credentials, settings storage and gameserver databases. it does mean the data is extremely valuable.

[@syotos8643]

What case is your bigger NAS in?

[@Jims-Garage]

It's this one: www.servercase.co.uk/shop/server-cases/rackmount/4u-chassis/4u-standard-chassis-15-x-35-hdd-sc-415h/

[@brendon72]

Interesting video, but I have to ask - what's your electricity bill like?

[@Jims-Garage]

About £80 per month

[@brendon72]

@@Jims-Garagesuprisingly unterrible! Loving your content btw. Concise and to the point.

[@Jims-Garage]

@@brendon72 thanks 😊