Excuse the mess, this has been WIP for 4 years.
The early days
Mistakes were made
All of this has either been repurposed, moved, or is dead.
The “NAS” was four Odroid HC2’s in a trenchcoat cosplaying as a NAS using BeeGFS. Windows does not quite understand what it is talking to, but Linux did, so the box on the right had to mediate limiting the ordeal to 2-ish GBit at best. “Server” was the backup target, made from an old PC stuffed with HDDs.
Last Year
Totally going to fix this edition
RB5009 (PoE version) showed up, and took charge of the operation. To keep the cable mess in check, I had the “brilliant” (= dumb) idea of putting 9" components in there, a power strip and a patch panel.
The plan was fine-ish:
Execution, not so much:
Note, the “NAS” and “Server” are currently not involved in this mess, they are on a switch by themselves syncing their data because backups kept failing when they had to find each other through this mess.
Plan 2025
Moar Data, Moar Rooom, planning ahead?
Since the above, setup, the NAS-Cluster has been offline, the secondary has been sold (because Steamdeck took its spot) and I moved to a new place.
Goals:
- Finish project BigRig (BuildLog and Planning Thread)
- Blocky/Pi-Hole needs fixing ASAP
- Fix Backup-NAS (Title: BU-Target)
- Build File-NAS to replace “NAS” (Title: Data Grave)
- Functional WiFi
Side-Quests:
- Revive the FOSS-Torrent-SBC (Title: T-Pie)
- Play around with BeeGFS some more
- prepare for home-cinema
- 802.1X for everything
Planned network setup:
This is a nearly complete overview of any planned or existing components.
“FastHoryzen” and “BigRig” both have 25G network cards and one of them will be the machine with management access.
Devices that are close together in the same background are physically close in reality.
Color guide
Cables:
- Turquoise - Fiber, Access and Core network
- Red - Management-net/Core net
- Blue - Core-network, includes 10G
- Green - Access/Data network
Locations:
- Dark Grey - “Office”
- Light Grey - Tinkering-area
- Red - Closet
- Purple - Living room
[Picture TBD]
Main part of the mess, ignore the SBCs sitting on the unused switches. 
I promise to add a keystone-patchpanel and a rack-shelf soon.
Reasoning and other stuff people argue about
I am aware none of this is necessary to do, it is about learning and because two of my hobbies are quite good at creating HUGE amounts of data.
For the rest of 2024, BigRig should be able to handle all the nonsense I do, but my current backup situation can very definitely not. “Just stuff more HDDs” does not work when the only way to expand is to throw more USB-HDD enclosures into this mess.
Using someone elses computer for data storage is out of the question entirely. All of this runs locally and I may add some angry looking firewall down the line.
