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…
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…
I wanted an easy way to add and remove drives for cold storage backups, so I created this external drive caddy using this Hard Drive Rack. It is no long available on Amazon and has gone up in price, but you can create your own using similar methods or devices.…
I have since moved on from using this switch to a Brocade ICX6610, but when I first started learning and homelabbing I bought a couple Cisco routers and switches. First I was using a Catalyst 3560G. Eventually I got a Cisco WS-C3750X, both because I wanted something with PoE but…