I wanted 5GbE for my SAN network without buying new PCIe cards, so I picked up a BrosTrend USB-A 5GbE adapter (Realtek RTL8157). On Proxmox VE 9 it only linked at 1000Mb/s out of the box. Installing a community Linux 7.1 kernel on that one node fixed it,…
I usually run the UniFi Network Application in Docker, and more recently UniFi OS Server in podman. One of our locations, though, runs it on a Windows Server VM. The application can't run as a Windows service, so after a reboot it just doesn't start. I…
I built this kegerator a long time ago and wish I'd documented it. I didn't expect it to turn out this well. The base is an old chest freezer. The top is a solid wood door. I painted the door with chalk paint so I can…
NOTE: I have since switched to a USB 3.1 USB 5GB Etherner adapter. It is of course slower, but the speed does meet my needs, frees up the NVMe port, and doesn't look near as janky. It also thankfully eliminates the power supply, a singular point of…
Browser warnings on my internal sites got old, especially past 20 or so self-hosted services. This setup gets trusted certificates for internal services using a DNS challenge, and the services stay behind the firewall. It has two goals: remove the browser warning, and use HTTPS end to end, even on…
My rack used to sit in the middle of the basement. It was loud and made the space look messy, so I moved it into the closet under the stairs. It fits with room to spare, and there's a gap at the back for running cables. The closet…
I got an old Datto Siris 3 from a previous job. Its motherboard is an ASRock Rack D1541D4U-2T8R. I had been running TrueNAS on a separate RAID card. My original plan was to add a Mellanox CX311A for 10Gb. Then I looked up the board's specs and found…
This is the first in a series on how I built my homelab. My hosts use older Intel hardware, 6th to 9th gen. It's cheap, and desktops from that period still have useful specs, including NVMe slots. This page is the high-level overview. Each step gets its own…