Some ramblings usually about computers
I recently stumbled across Semaphore, which is essentially a frontend for managing DevOps tooling, including Ansible, Terraform, OpenTofu, and PowerShell. It’s easy to deploy in Docker, and I am slowly moving more of my homelab management over to it. Introduction This is a guide to show you how to get Continue Reading
How Warp is helping me run my homelab.
How to fix Portainer Agent not starting on Synology
Update: Hoarder has now been renamed to Karakeep due to a trademark issue I have been on a mission recently to regain control of my data. I haven’t yet faced the humongous task of moving my main email from Gmail but I have had some successes with other cloud services Continue Reading
Table of Contents Copy on Write Disk ID’s Trim I have run a number of systems utilising ZFS since the earliest days of my homelab using Nexenta all the way back in 2010. The image below is my lab at the time with an IBM Head unit that I think Continue Reading
Artificial intelligence is all the rage at the moment, It’s getting included in every product announcement from pretty much every vendor under the sun. Nvidia’s stock price has gone to the moon. So I thought I better get some knowledge and understand some of this. As it’s a huge field Continue Reading
Yes, that’s a clickbait title. But technically it’s possible if I dropped all drive redundancy… I recently saw an advert for a server that was just too good to be true. It promised to bring a huge amount of storage and future options in a quite hard-to-believe 1U. The price Continue Reading
My journey to superfast networking in my homelab
I recently decided to update some of my homelab hosts and I managed to do this at very little cost by offloading 2 of my Supermicro e200’s to fellow vExpert Paul. The below post describes what I bought why and how I have configured it. Table of Contents Node Choice Continue Reading
How to deploy Holodeck with Legacy CPU’s
A little while ago I decided to play with vGPU in my homelab. This was something I had dabbled with in the past but never really had the time or need to get working properly. The first thing that I needed was a GPU. I did have a Dell T20 Continue Reading
I am a huge fan of the Runecast product and luckily as a vExpert they give out NFR licences for my lab. One of the really cool features I wanted to mention today was the remediation script function. I have been playing with storage a lot in my lab recently Continue Reading
I have been a VMware vExpert for many years and it has brought me many many benefits over the years. I don’t think it’s an understatement to say I probably wouldn’t have my current role within VMware without it. One of the best benefits has been access to a huge Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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 Continue Reading
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. Continue Reading
Packer is one of those tools I have heard about, and some of the cool people on Twitter that I follow have been using it for a while. But until now I had never played with it. That was until I saw the below tweet by the legend that is Continue Reading
Lab Storage Update. Since starting my new role with Xtravirt my Homelab has gone through several fairly significant changes. At the moment it’s very much focused on the VMware stack and one of the things I needed was some more storage and especially some more storage performance. With that in mind, Continue Reading
I have been meaning to post around some of the lab setup for a while. Although it changes frequently at present it’s as below. I will add some pics when I have tidied up the lab/cables My primary lab storage is all contained within an HP Gen8 Microserver. Currently Configured: Continue Reading