airspeed's homelab blog

[airspeed]

Hi, I’m going to be using this blog thread to document my homelab and hopefully get some good input along the way from y’all. I’m a networking student and I’ve landed a pretty sweet part time job. Hopefully, that job will allow me to get some cool hardware. Right now, everything is a little bootstrap.

I’ve started with a router. This machine is an HP ProDesk that I scored on marketplace for $30. I think it’s a 4th gen i5 of some variation, but it is plenty to run a pfsense router/firewall for me. I bought a 2 port intel gigabit nic of amazon and I was off to the races. I could probably utilize the hardware much better. The modem/router thing with my isp is locked down, so it’s giving my firewall a private ip, but I’ll eventually call them and get it put into bridge mode so I can play around with opening some of my resources to the public(brother needs to backup from his place/jellyfin on the go eventually).

Here’s a cheap 4u rack with an old cisco switch I got from one of my instructors. One of my coworkers mentioned he might be able to give me his gigabit ubiquity switch, so that I can avoid the 24 “fast” ethernet ports on this 2960. Also, there is an old 1060 I just replaced the fans on(more on that later).

My PC is kinda due an upgrade to help my 1440p gaming. I built it in 2020 with the 1060 graphics card with the intent to upgrade the GPU, which I did last year to a 6700xt when I saw a good deal on a PowerColor card. Here’s the specs:
MSI X570-A PRO
Ryzen 7 2700x
AMD Radeon 6700 XT
16 GB of 2400 MT/s RAM (Crucial maybe?) 2 x 8 GB
A couple 500 GB SSDs
A Fractal Design Focus G Case with 2 x 5.25in bays that I want to fill with some IcyDock stuff.

I was gonna just slap a big HDD in it, share it to the network with samba, and then be done with it. But, now I’m thinking I should just save up for a new gaming rig, and repurpose all the old stuff for my server. I could reuse the case for an IcyDock bay for 3x3.5in HDDs in RAID 5. I could use to msi 1060 card for transcoding media. And the board/cpu/memory would be more than enough for proxmox with all my server needs(storage, media, VMs, maybe a minecraft/rust server or something).

Y’all have any recommendation for how I should go about building a server/upgrading my gaming rig and best utilizing the old parts? I might make a seperate topic in buildapc for this, but for now I’ll leave this here. Thanks.

[mini-pouce]

For your gaming rig the better option seems to just upgrade to a 2nd hand Ryzen 5000. R5 should be cheap and R7 5700 affortable too.
Maybe RAM if you want to give you headroom (better get 2*16 GB at 3600 than expanding yours).
Then you could temporise several years more for a more significant upgrade.

Otherwise every things of your last paragraph could be done on your HP box, which is probably mostly idling in its small router job.

[airspeed]

Ok, this is the update no one has been waiting for. I have moved on from a helpdesk intern/student → CCNA Certified → Network Engineer at an ISP, so I’ve been busy. Now I have finally moved into my own place and got fiber internet.

Here ya go!

Starting over on the home lab because it wasn’t really doing anything before hand anyway. Used the HP prodesk(installed a 2 port gigabit NIC from intel) as a DIY pfsense router. Mainly so I can setup a VPN/Wake-on-LAN to access what I host later, but also IPS/IDS yadda yadda… The Adtran ONT and the TP Deco Router are both provided by my ISP. The Deco is in AP mode. Finally, a 5 port gigabit netgear switch. This is a barebones home network that will allow me to access services that I host, and it’s ugly… Maybe I’ll fix that, probably not.