Intro
Howdy to anyone reading. This site is primarily a portfolio of my career and some personal projects but I thought it would be fun to write blog posts to track my growth and progress on my hobbies & jobs, this is my first entry into what will hopefully be semi regular updates on AV tech, homelabs, potentially some MTG tournaments and whatever else I am hyperfixated on in any given week
While in the process of trying to reorganise my home I took the mess of computers off my shelf and put them into a rack, I went a touch overboard and decided to buy an 18RU rack despite realistically only taking up 4RU worth of space but this was because I wanted to leave ample room for growth and I had some equipment (which is already in the rack) that I wanted to get operational and implement into my homelab.
I bought the rack and the rack hardware off of Titan AV since I have used them for fly racks in my work in the past. I was incredibly impressed with the wireframe rack, it was super simple, went together really quickly and surprised me with how solid it felt after it was assembled despite me only tightening the bolts by hand. The shelves however were very fragile and I needed to bend some back into place because they had moved in transit, granted they were very cheap so I got what I paid for, in the future I would probably spend a bit more on sturdier shelves but I was very happy with the rack itself.
Inside the rack is a UDM pro which does all my home networking, 3 mini PCs & a NAS I built [add specs] which run all my homelab services including the site you’re reading this on. Below the UDM pro is a broken switch which is currently just acting as a shelf until I get rack ears for the UDM pro, down the bottom is 3 dell power edge servers which I am hoping to turn into something in the future, the furthest I’ve gotten so far is having them power up.
Services I’m currently running
Below is a breakdown of the services that I am running as of the date of writing this post:
Ikora
Primary Proxmox Machine - running critical infrastructure services
Ikora-Truenas (TrueNAS)
TrueNAS VM for my main home storage server
Ikora-Portainer (Debian12)
- Portainer
- Homarr
- Netbootxyz
- Traefik
- Wireguard server
Toland
Secondary Proxmox Machine - running non critical services
Toland-Portainer (Debian12)
- Immich
- Syncthing (a push pull config with all of my laptops to have access to certain documents across all devices)
- this website!!
- Mealie (I’ve yet to implement this much into my day to day but I endeavour to do so)
Toland-Arr (Debian12)
I’ll choose to leave this one up to the imagination
Toland-Pihole (LXC)
This is the only piece of critical infrastructure running on toland and it is due to not having spare memory on Ikora to spin up an LXC. It’s a debian LXC running pihole to my homes dns server
Eris
Bare metal jellyfin instance as it made hardware accelleration easier
Asher
This is my sandbox machine to spin things up on
What’s Next?
So with that brief introduction & breakdown written, what’s to come in the future? Well… hopefully lots of stuff (after I clean the dust off those machines), as I mentioned above there’s some enterprise dell servers that I would love to get operational. I’m very intrigued by the introduction of NixOS into my homelab and I think I would like to move from the UDM pro over to PFSense. Beyond the homelab tasks you may occasionally hear about my escapades playing competitive Magic the Gathering & I always have a never ending list of things to work on for my job for anyone interested in audio-visual technologies, perhaps an upcoming post in the near future will be how I use a raspberry pi to enhance my workflow on every corporate event I operate.
Thank you for anyone who read to the end of this. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while and I look forward to continuing to add to this as time goes on.