Introduction
Hello and welcome to my blog, this is the first post, ever. In this first post, I will show the current status of my homelab, my new rack; the Samson SRK16 and my plans for the near future.
Current status
The current setup is quite messy, it’s just two desktop PCs and some other stuff that’s been put in a closet.
Here’s a picture of the current situation, it has been like this for way too long and the time has come to tidy it up.
The left machine is my hypervisor and is running Proxmox. It has an AMD Ryzen 5600G, 64GB of DDR4 RAM, and 2 NVME drives. This machine runs all of my virtual machines and docker containers.
Currently, hosted software is the following:
- Vaultwarden (Password manager)
- Homeassistant (Basic setup just connected to my Philips Hue bridge)
- Bookstack (Note-taking)
- Unifi Controller (For my Unifi AP)
- Photoprism (Google Photos alternative)
- Grafana (Monitoring the lab)
- InfluxDB (Datasource for Grafana using Telegraf to get node metrics)
- Traefik (Reverse proxy that handles all my Let’s Encrypt certificates)
And then some desktop OS VMs that I remote into using VNC/RDP.
The right machine is my NAS and is running Truenas Scale, it has a Pentium G4560, 12GB of DDR4 RAM, a 256GB SSD as a boot drive and 2 8TB shucked external WD drives for storage.
The NAS is the one I’m the least proud of, mainly due to the lack of ECC RAM, but that is going to be fixed, more on that later.
The big mess up top is a Linksys LGS308 Managed switch, a Raspberry Pi 3A running Wireguard VPN and a Philips Hue hub.
The rack
To be able to tidy up the situation, I have bought a rack to put my equipment in.
I went for the Samson SRK16 audio rack, while this is not inherently made for servers, it will fit my use case perfectly.
Since the rack is going in my hallway, it needed to be short in depth and not too tall. The closed sides are also a benefit and make things look way better.
One of the downsides to going with an audio rack instead of a proper server rack is the lack of square holes, this prevents you from using rails on your servers. However, this is not an issue that I’m too worried about since I don’t have a problem shutting it down if I need to do hardware maintenance.
Here is a picture of the rack:
It was very easy to assemble and great value in my opinion, it also includes a 1u blank cover and a bunch of rack screws. I purchased it for about 125 EUR or about 135 USD, very study for the price.
And here is where it will be placed, in my hallway right next to the fibre optic converter.
Future plans
My plan for the near future is to move all the things from the closet into the rack, starting with the NAS.
I have purchased a refurbished Supermicro Storeserver with a Supermicro X10SLM+-LN4F motherboard, an Intel Xeon E3-1245v3 CPU (4C/8T), and 32GB of DDR3 ECC RAM.
It also includes an Adaptec ASR-6405 SAS controller, but I will not be using this now.
The plan is to move this into a larger chassis, mainly to lower the fan noise, but also to allow expandability in the future. This will then replace my NAS.
It should be arriving any day now.
See you in the next post, where I will be testing the new Supermicro server.