Background
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Being the hardware obsessed broke college student that I am, it should be no surprise my HomeLab is built from is built from 70% decommissioned university hardware, 20% decommissioned datacenter hardware, and 10% jank ass engineering.
My first server was an HP DL165 G5 that served not only as a space heater, but also as a quick way to piss off everyone else in my apartment complex. It did however get me interested in what I could do with older servers. I had always wanted to make a redundant storage array to store my data and photos in addition to my cloud storage, and I was intrigued at the possibility of having additional computers in addition to my workstation to offload simulations to as well as experiment with. Fortunately for my neighbors node 29 here was not going to be the server I would deploy long term |
Hardware
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This is my current HomeLab in all its glory. It is currently housed in a cut down generic 42U rack with absolutely no brand markings whatsoever. As I live in a tiny overpriced apartment, a 42U rack was most definitely not going to fly so I cut it down to 18U at 2:00 in the morning behind my place of employment. Due to the racks design, I still have full length rack rails for the entire 18U, with the frame of the rack being cut mid way. It wasn't my best work, but the streetlights weren't the brightest and the rack is more than strong enough for its height.
As far as power distribution goes, I have a 2200VA UPS curtsy of UCSB E-waste with brand new batteries. This is the main source of power for all the rack mount equipment, all networking equipment, and my workstation. It feeds power from its 2x 20 amp outputs to dual HP Intelligent PDU each with 5x C13 outlets that feed power to the entire rack. An APC AP7900 switched PDU is also mounted around back to power all my Nema 5-15R gear (mainly DC power supplies) which power the more consumer level gear. Going from top to bottom, the first device is my cheep ass router. I plan on replacing this with a pfSense powered box soon, however soon is not today, and I'm still waiting for UCSB to throw out an old ATX motherboard I can repurpose. Underneath that is my collection of switches, which consists of my main 8 port managed NetGear switch, as well as my 8 port unmanaged IPMI/management switch which runs on its own separate VLAN for security. I also have a few old POE ProCurve switch I use to learn about HP routing with, however it is limited to 10/100 Mbps so it is relegated to experimentation. I do hope to get a ProCurve 2824 switch here in the near future, but only time and the UCSB E-waste decommissioning gods will know when that will occur. This is also where my Raspberry Pi is running, which is hosting my DNS server/sinkhole, as well as my Pi VPN//Open VPN server. |
