Homelab 2024

Posted on by Mike McClay

The old homelab continues to evolve and the current version has changed enough from the last time I posted about it to cover the what and why of it.

Dream Machine Pro Max acting as the main router. This replaces the Asus routers that I’d been using before and is a significant step up in capabilities. The option to expand out the features, using the UniFi ecosystem, so that it can be a PVR and management pane for home security and access is of interest. As well as its ability to mange the UniFi range of WiFi equipment. At the moment I’m enjoying the much more mature views and insights it offers into my network traffic and the more in depth management of it. It’s a powerful beast with 10G throughput for routing and firewall capabilities. As well as featuring IDS/IPS, but there is a throughput penalty if those are active.

Mikrotik CRS309-1G-8S+ this is the main switch for the lab for fiber and DAC connections. Together with a NETGEAR XS508M for 10G over Ethernet, and a combination of them both allows all my lab equipment to connect at a minimum of 10G speeds. They are connected to each other via a 10G fiber link.

2x Whitebox home built servers. Powered by an AMD 5900X cpu, 128GB of ram, on an AsRock Rack X470D4U Motherboard. This is currently running on WMWare EXSI 7, but will most likely be moved over to Proxmox. Due to the death of VMug (VMware user group) post Broadcom takeover, killing off discounted access to licenses for professionals to use in their lab work.

Synology 1821+ NAS This provides the core storage for the Vmware lab. The VM’s are hosted on NFS datastores. This NAS is backed up using snapshot replication to my older 1819+, as well as making use of snapshots to protect the active file system from ransomware and accidental deletion of data. It also hosts various Docker containers on its Container Manager service, as well as hosting the DNS zones for the lab.

I’m less impressed with this NAS over time as Synology keep removing or hiding features that professionals in the industry use as well as home users.

Such as hiding SMART metrics for the drives, overly promoting, or mandating the use of, their own rebranded drives. Cheeping out by removing CODEC support for HEIC/H.265 which were supported when the units shipped. Which impacted paying customers for their add on Security product, as well as home users using the devices for their advertised purpose as a media server, etc.

While there are workarounds to address these issues it’s increasingly indicative of a mindset change in the company. When it reaches end of life I may look elsewhere or roll my own.

Don’t cross the streams

Posted on by Mike McClay

So, my attempt at enjoyment while dosed with the flu was nixed by my setup denying me access to my audio media on my NAS.

A dive into the problem showed that it was really two problems. So, if your NAS, Synology in my case, is no longer visible over DLNA then a reboot of your network switches may be the solution. It was the last thing I tried, probably due to being dosed with the flu. But it seems to have fixed the undesired blocking of the DLNA SSDP advertisement over my network and restored my ability to see my NAS on DLNA clients again.

The second problem was that the Synology NAS was not showing all of the music and occasionally nothing at all via the Media Server app. This turned out to be a problem with the indexing service on the NAS, and the solution to fixing it was to change the file type on the indexed folders. After a lengthy time, it completed the indexing, and the Media Server app was able to see and serve the content once more. I had previously tried to reindex, but it was only when I changed the File Type for the indexed Folder in the Indexing Service that it fixed this issue.

After solving these issues I could once more stream music to Foobar 2000 on my ipad, and attempt to chill out while waiting for my own AV to kick this flu virus’s ass.