I’m a 26 year veteran systems / infrastructure engineer and often work on large scale data / server migration projects. My homelab is larger and more robust than 95% of the client sites I service; everything is enterprise class hardware and software. I self host my own RMM, VPN, and various data and entertainment services. Most of the things I run here are to make my life better or easier for myself and my family.

My formal education is in business administration; I did not go to school specifically for an IT Degree. It’s just something I love. I went to school to understand the business side of the thing I love, which has been very helpful. If you find a job doing what you love, work can feel like an accomplishment instead of a burden.

Never stop learning!

Ok, this is sick. Well done. I love how modular it is.

I just thought it was funny their stars lean to the left. You’d think they’d have blown a gasket over this but it seems they just haven’t noticed.

The stars aren’t even centered. They’re to the left. I call shenanigans

TrueNas is pretty top notch and offers a variety of storage and protocol options. If you’re at all familiar with Linux style OS, it should be pretty easy to work with. Setting up storage comes with a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s not too bad. This SAN/NAS OS is polished, performant, and extensible. If you’re not planning on using SMB or Samba, you can most certainly use NFS, or iSCSI if that’s your thing.

Shit, are consumer appliances really getting that bad? ew!

My house has manual windows, manual locks, and a dumb garage door controller… because I work in IT.

I do have a few smart appliances (environment reporting) but they are only allowed on the banishment VLAN so they don’t get to interact with any single appliance inside my network. All they see is internet and nothing else.

Initiator Target mode and Host Bus Adapter mode are interchangable terms for the same thing. The card has 2 modes, one is RAID (don’t use this) and the other is Initiator-Target or HBA mode.

ZFS needs direct disk access so flash the IT .bin for HBA mode using the P20 (latest) drivers and you’re g2g.

Thanks!

A man of character!

Nope, it’s more important than that… It runs my battestation!

That’s actually pretty damn cool

Yes yes yes yes yes

Raid1 that thing and sleep easier. Good on you for having a cold spare, and knowing to buy your drives at different locations/times to get different batches. Your head is in the right place! No reason to leave that data unprotected if you have the underlying tech and hardware.

Yeah no kidding, paying for unraid?

TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) keeps getting better, for free. It does most of the same tricks that the big boy appliances do, but with your commodity hardware, at no cost.

And it does all this exceedingly well. AND if you want… you can buy support. At your discretion.

Hard disks, WD/HGST.

I’ve had good luck with EMC and NetApp for enterprise solutions, Synology for SMB class NAS storage, and rely on TrueNAS/ZFS on supermicro hardware at home, which has been rock solid for years and years.

Type 1 runs on bare metal. You install it directly onto server hardware. Type 2 is an application (not an OS) lives inside an OS, regardless of whether that OS is a guest or a host, the hypervisor is a guest of that platform, and the VMs inside it are guests of that hypervisor.

That’s the one!

I’m a big fan of the Sofle RGB layout. The board kit is about 25 bucks from little keyboards (where I got my kits). Add a 20$ case, some cheap caps and switches, and a set of micros and a cable and you’re there.

Same for any other DIY board really, this will get you where you want to go without the level of spending you want to stay away from. Corne is mentioned here as well, similar layout with less keys.

You could go with something even cheaper like a Helix kit but you’ll still be around 20 bucks plus the rest of the parts, so that extra 5-10 bucks on the kit is worth it if you want something a bit more contemporary.

Most of the split kits are going to be around the same price. They start around 20. My Sofle kits were 25 each. You’d need to add a pair of MC’s , switches, caps, which is where things get pricey. If you shop around you can find good deals. The PCBs and components represent a smaller part of the cost compared to the rest of the dressings.

Very clean, well done!