Subj : Re: Proxmox homelab
To   : Mhansel739
From : poindexter FORTRAN
Date : Mon Jan 22 2024 06:53:00

-=> Mhansel739 wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

 Mh> What kind of "server" are you running the environment on? Can you tell
 Mh> me why you chose Proxmox over ESXI? I am curious.

My homelab (https://realitycheckbbs.org/images/homelab.jpg) is a
mishmosh of cast-off and unwanted hardware I've collected over the
years.

1. A Lenovo Thinkpad with a marked-up screen and broken keyboard. I
maxxed the RAM up to 20 GB and replaced a spinning drive with a spare
SSD. I took the back off and replaced the thermal paste and blew out the
dust before putting it into "production". It's got the built-in gig
ethernet and a USB3 gig ethernet dongle.

2. A Netgear R6400 router running DD-WRT - bought by the pound at a
Goodwill outlet, I think it was $4.95.

3. A gigabit desktop switch tossed out from a company when they went
802.1x authentication on the network. Some switches couldn't pass 802.1x
but work fine for everything else.

4. Synology NAS - I bought the chassis used for $120, populated it
with a handful of drives I had left over when I moved my desktop to an
SSD.

5. 10GB external SCSI - attached to the NAS or backups. It's the only
thing I paid full price for!

I use ESXi at work, but it's picky about hardware. Later versions of
ESXi wouldn't run on server-class hardware that earlier versions ran
fine on -- we ended up refreshing servers to meet VMWare's compatibility
list.

I thought there was a pretty good chance an obsolete laptop wouldn't be
supported, so I bit the bullet and loaded Proxmox.

This cobbled-together solution runs the BBS, a pihole DNS server, a
reverse proxy server for my internal web servers, a small active
directory test environment, a Docker host and a couple of LXC
containers. The NAS provides NFS shares to my Proxmox environment, SMB
shares and backup for my desktop PC, and DLNA media sharing to my TVs.



.... From nothing to more than nothing
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