For a while, I’ve been looking to update the networking at the core of my homelab. I have had some great results with the current setup utilising a number of DAC’s but there were a couple of things that were annoying me. Then MikroTik dropped the CRS504-4XQ-IN and if the price wasn’t horrendous then that…
I run a reasonably extensive homelab that is of course built around the VMware ecosystem. So with the release of vSphere 8 I was obviously going to upgrade however a few personal things blocked me from doing it until now. The vCenter upgrade was smooth however knowing that some of the hardware I am running…
Late to the party or not, I have been using containers in my lab more and more and that has led me to Portainer…. I use it for managing the docker containers on my Synology but it can also be used for managing lots of other things. In their own words “Portainer accelerates container adoption….
I recently spent 3 weeks in Ireland with my wife Wendy and our son Nate. This involves driving from the south coast of Dorset up to Scotland and then getting a ferry over to Belfast before travelling west to the Republic. While driving I got a slack notification that one of my SSD’s in my…
For a while now I have been running this site directly from Cloudflare utilising their excellent worker’s product. I did this originally as a learning exercise but due to the benefits It brought and the ease of use I decided to stick with it. The benefits are several fold: Crazy Web Performance (Typically full page…
Since moving to Dorset last year internet connectivity has been the bane of my existence. Currently, I have an ADSL connection provided by my old employer Zen and a 5G connection provided by Three. These are both plumbed into my WatchGuard Firewall with multi-wan configured. Most of the time the usability is ok but there…
I am a massive fan of the brew package management system for macOS and use it on all of my Mac’s I typically just upgrade everything blindly and have never had an issue….. Until today… I went to push some changes to this site and got the following error message A quick bit of digging…
The HP Z840 has changed its role to a permanent storage box running Truenas Scale. This is in addition to my Synology DS918+ TrueNas is the successor to FreeNas a very popular BSD based StorageOS and TrueNas scale is a fork of this based on Linux. The Synology has been an amazing piece of kit…
I have retired the WatchGuard Devices with the migration to PFSense running bare-metal in one of the Supermicro Nodes. I will likely virtualise this in the future. In terms of network/switching I have moved to an intermediate step here vMotion and Storage are running over DAC’s while VMware management and VM traffic is still over…
My lab is always undergoing change. Partially as I want to try new things or new ways of doing things. Sometimes because I break things (not always by accident) sometimes it’s a great way to learn…. I decided to list the workloads I am looking to run (some of these are already in place) Infrastucture…
Quite a few changes have happened in the lab recently. so I decided to do a multipart blog on the changes. The refresh was triggered by the purchase of a SuperMicro Server (2027TR-H71FRF) chassis with 4x X9DRT Nodes / Blades. This is known as a BigTwin configuration in SuperMicro parlance. This is something I was…
I have been making several changes (mainly cosmetic to this site over the last day or so) On most changes I have been doing an export and then uploading the site to Cloudflare using Wrangler. After a while I received an email from Cloudflare saying: Hi, You’re 50% of the way to reaching one of…