53 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
53 lines
3.1 KiB
Markdown
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Categories = ["BLSE"]
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Description = "In this series, I discuss my homelab: what it is, how it's set up, and what it does. Part one discusses the physical components of the lab."
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Tags = ["homelab", "cableporn", "blse"]
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date = "2016-10-18T22:54:45-04:00"
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menu = "main"
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title = "Anatomy of a Homelab, part I - Meatspace"
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draft = true
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It's late 2016, and the "cloud" is everywhere. It is a mythical, monlithic entity at this point,
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provided by Amazon and Google and Microsoft, and meaning: "I don't need to spend money on hardware".
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But despite the widely-held beliefs of middle-managers and salesfolk, even the most modern of
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"clouds" needs something tangable - power and cooling and machines - humming along somewhere. When I
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first started with homelabs, they were small: a router and a server running some flavour of Windows
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or Linux, which could easily be mistaken for almost any corporate deployment in the late-2000's. As
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time has passed and I've grown into a seasoned Linux sysadmin, I've expanded and expanded my lab.
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However, while many of my ilk were flocking to the new cloud, with its on-demand instances and
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smooth monthly billing, I instead chose to double-down. I've always loved the hardware, and taking
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ownership of my house, I was finally able to get away with plans I never could before. And as the
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plans matured along with my abilities, I started looking to that cloud as inspiration. Today, I can
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safely say I'm proud of the cloud I've built, and hope now to share it with you, to entertain, to
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inform, and to inspire. My growth in knowledge has been long, and will never end, but at this time I
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hope I can impart something onto you! Please enjoy your read.
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# What and why?
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The first question is: what is a homelab? Simply put, it is a collection of server and networking
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equipment that a person runs in their home, instead of in a company computer room or datacenter.
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Homelabbing is a popular hobby among the system and network administration communities, and among
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some who don't work in the industry. I myself got into system administration through tinkering with
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a small home server. Once I began my professional career after several years of schooling, I was
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finally able to afford a large system both financially and in terms of time. And here we are today.
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If you're finding my blog for the first time, you should know that I'm a systems administrator
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(sysadmin) specializing in the open-source GNU/Linux operating system. This means I spend a lot of
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time staring quizically and typing furiously into a terminal window, making systems do my bidding.
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Some would say I'm a wizard, especially myself. This isn't just my chosen career, but my passion
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and my main hobby as well. It is also an industry that is constantly changing, even day to day, and
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keeping up and is good takes a lot of time. But to me, it is a pleasureful and immensely fun
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activity. To further the hobby side, I need an environment with which to work, and living in a full
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house with a basement to isolate the sound and heat, I was able to acquire a significant quantity of
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equipment over the year. And I still enjoy doing it; this is the "why".
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# The Rack in the Room
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