My Overkill Home Network - Complete Details 2023

Me: hey, I own that exact Anker USB power supply. I'm basically as pro as this guy!

Narrator: his old laptop and external hard drive set-up was not as impressive, even with the Anker USB power supply.

I think the reason we aren't rich is because we do shit like this.

Anyway, I'm off to buy enough HDDs to get me through the end of the month.

Honestly its all cheaper than you think, 100% of it I bought used bar a few things, and over a long amount of time too. Plus messing with stuff like this has 100% helped me advance my career

it's this or plastic surgery

"What would you do if you won the lottery?"

Me: points to this blog post.

You’ll be surprised how cheap some equipment goes for when a company runs out of business. Just sayin

Honestly I'd love to throw a LAN party

Also wanna know

Honestly, I'm not 100% sure. I don't have a way to monitor just the stuff in the rack as the UPS also powers a lot of other stuff in the house. Either way, I've worked to make everything fairly low power, or at least as low power as feasible. The things that use the most power is the disks

I can tell you its less than 800w though, as that's the lowest the UPS goes at night. But that also does include both me and my wifes desktops which stay on 24/7, and an Apple TV, and standby power for all devices etc

Be single. Problem solved.

I’ve thought about it, and nobody will care about your/my elaborate setup after we are gone. It will just be replaced by a ISP router without regrets.

I have Bitwarden set to give my wife access if she requests it and I don't respond in X days

Things generally "just work" so she would have access to everything, and she can figure out what she wants to do. All the passwords are there and all of the configs are fairly easy for stuff she cares about anyway

Also thought about that a lot. The most important is that your people can access your data. My partner and bestie both have LUKS keys on all of my devices.

Maybe do a test run with them to see if they can actually access it.

My opinion is that your spouse will have to get rid of any other hobby related stuff. If you're a fisherman, she's going to have to find something to do with all the tackle, boat/s, gear.

I know a guy that was a woodworker who had a shop full of well over $20k worth of tools. Poor guy got cancer and died, and his wife had to try to get rid of all of it. Luckily she had some of his woodworking friends who helped her price and sell the stuff. (I got a pretty nice used planer out of the deal)

I've been there! Such a hassle. It was great when I moved and was finally able to do what I wanted

I am in the US and I do... In fact, I can upgrade to symmetrical 5Gb now with AT&T

Australian here, I get 1000 / 50.. don't ask what it costs to upgrade that upload speed.

Best I can do is my public key on the contact page!

I don't know if I should be happy or sad

Who mentioned Raptor?....

It sure can, but so far I've not found much use for it. I set it up to see if it can block YouTube ads in the mobile app, but it can't. Since I already use uBlock Origin, I don't know what I gain

Thanks!

Zero problems, often times stuff in the house is actually hotter than stuff in the garage funnily enough, even in summer

1. You’re using the Linode box as the server, on which you forward ports for your services. Am I to assume that you somehow access your homelab via your VPN using the Linode box too? Usually people would access their lab at home directly.

Yes, I also access the lab via the Linode box. I do however have direct VPN access too. The reason for using the Linode box is that for some reason, the speed and latency via the Linode box is far better that directly in. I can only assume its some kind of peering thing. I always connect in via my phone on T-Mobile, so perhaps the connection between T-Mobile and Linode, and the connection between AT&T and Linode, is better than T-Mobile to AT&T Residential? Unsure, all I know is that it works 100x better. And it also means I don't need 2 different connections for the primary and secondary WAN, I can just connected to Linode and it will connect over whatever connection is active

2. Wouldn’t a whitebox build for your NAS save power?

This really is a whitebox build, it uses very little power. The disks use the most amount of power, which there is no getting around

3. What are you using both switches for? Are you running out of ports?

The 1Gb switches? yes, I ran out of ports on the Dell, or am very, very close

4. Since you’re running VMWare, are you running VMs for every service? Why not containers?

Everything that can run in containers already is, on Debian VM's within ESXi

5. Even if most of the content on your blog is static, how are you hosting it for it to load so quickly? Are you using some sort of CDN in front of your Linode box to cache the static assets like pictures?

I am using CloudFlare in front of it, so that's probably why. But even directly its pretty quick. I guess NVMe storage and decent internet means its fast?

Thanks!

Not OP, but also curious about number 5, I noticed that blog article loaded lickety-split!

I already made a detailed write up on the whole install and all the issues I faced, and monitoring. Here you go!

https://blog.networkprofile.org/17kw-enphase-solar-install/

https://blog.networkprofile.org/power-monitoring-setup-iotawatt-grafana/

https://blog.networkprofile.org/full-power-overview-and-qa/

Thanks!

Might be for time synchronization in order to not have to rely on a public NTP server.

1. Its cool. Imagine being able to get data from 12 satellites at the same time to get super accurate time, with a $10 GPS board. What a time to be alive!
2. I'm trying to reduce the amount of stuff I'm relying on the internet for. Time is pretty important, and having a local server solves all that.

Thanks!

Thanks!

Just wait until they remove your favorite show and jack up the price

What the heck! Not for me. Got a screenshot?

The grid both is and isn't unreliable. I've not had many random outages, but I have had 2 x day long outages on hot Friday's when they were replacing power poles, which the generator of course kept me through. Working from home, and being in the Texas heat, that would be bad. And I like many people now have really bad power outage PTSD after the 2021 Texas Freeze where we all lost power. I'll never let that happen again! And turning everything off is such a hassle, I want it to to all stay on no matter what. Since I work from home, that adds another layer too. Plus, I just like cool things

Yeah that seems kinda crazy to me too. I've lived in my current house for 8 years and the only time the power has gone out was when a vehicle crashed into one of the distribution boxes by the road. Our power and internet come from the same provider so it was a double whammy for several hours.

But I suppose it depends where you are - i worked at a place that had two independent power feeds from two different cities, massive UPSs to run the datacenter for 10 minutes and then two redundant diesel generators with several months of fuel on site. I still saw that go down twice in my time there.

I really think so too, really looking forward to getting it properly deployed

yes, but it's throughput must be measured in Kbps, right?

Thanks! No idea why you were downvoted

I do wish I had some white velcro though!

Ops got a diesel backup generator, says it takes 10 min to kick in if there's a power outage.

Yes, I have a 27kw Natural Gas standby generator with an ATS. It takes 10 seconds from power failure, to it switching to generator power. So, the UPS just bridges that gap

In the extremely unlikely even the natural gas goes out, I have a 7.2kw Tri-fuel portable generator (Gasoline, NG and Propane) and I keep around 80 gallons of gasoline on hand, and I have an inlet and interlock on the main breaker, so I can switch to that if needed

Yeah that's on my to do list, I'm looking for some ATS PDU's for cheap, like the CyberPower PDU20MHVT10AT

Thanks!