Ohio runs my personal server in a data center. Handles email, personal websites such as justin-lloyd.com (down and to the right if you’re on desktop), offsite-backup. Texas data center is a web application server hosting a “funny pictures” website I am building in my spare time. MS SQL => Kestrel => NGINX = ATS => Android/iOS/Web/Terminal clients.
The growth has been purely organic. I cannot say any of it is really planned ahead of time. I use 16U vertical rails for each rack, and then build a cabinet around them that works for the space it is in, e.g. 32U in the cat bathroom rack, which is 16U side-by-side with another 16U. The arcade cabinet rack is 16U technically, but I only have 6U of rails in there, as the other space is pull out drawers to make it easier to work on the workstations without having to deal with cabling issues. 16U at the RV.
For permanent infra, I tend to buy new, because I want that extended warranty and am not interested in buying somebody elses problem. For projects, it is a mix of ebay finds and road-side or ewaste center salvage. I don’t watch TV, but I probably own more 55" 4K TVs than any one person I know, because I salvage them (people in big cities throw out all sorts of stuff with minor electrical faults) and then turn them into personal projects, e.g. a touchscreen cat toy, a waterfall ring toss game in the door of an art gallery, a virtual window.
Some days it feels like everything is held together with string and chewing gum.
One man’s way too much shit is another man’s enjoyable hobby.
I am working on the build log for the jukebox project. It’ll be on github eventually.
I have a $700 Tyan motherboard in my workstation. When I was moving the motherboard from one case to another, I scraped the underside of the motherboard against the metal case and broke off a number of small SMT caps and resistors. In the middle of the pandemic. In the middle of a project. So I had to jump on Amazon and have a new motherboard shipped to me next day whilst I RMA’d the damaged one. What do you say when you break your workstation motherboard in a moment of casual clumsiness? “Well… fuck!”
The jukebox is a “retro” jukebox. Wood grain, lots of tactile buttons. Two 14" 4160x1100 pixel touch screens with a vacuum fluroescent display graphic effect that shows the tracks. Click an arcade button, play that track. So it looks like those old-style jukebox devices you’d find in a diner. There are two 1920x1080 flexible touchscreens (though I have them encased so they are just permanently curved touchscreen displays), that let you navigate the full library, show album artwork, search box, etc. It’s all driven by a single Raspberry Pi with a 4TB USB SSD for storage, and everything syncs to the music directory on my Synology NAS.
Am I in deep shit? Only if I don’t clean the litter box in the “Cat Bathroom.” So the only thing that can really go wrong is the power going out. Everything else is sort of redundant, and you can route around it by moving a few cables. I guess the UDM Pro SE taking a shit would cause me some issues. Or the cable modem. Everything else, though used daily and to its fullest extent, simply means those services, e.g. music server, become temporarily unavailable. No real disasters in over 20 years. The backup Synology NAS is effectivel a fail over for essential services, e.g. adguard, but even if both synology devices are down, there’s backup DNS resolving on the UDM and also with quad9.
Is it 84 cores? 4 in the NUC, 28x2 in Storm, 28 in oh-fuck. Never really thought of it that way. I’d like some 8490H XEONs but I cannot justify it right now.
Let me deal with this train to zone, then I will bring back a bunch of guards with me that you are KoS too. :-)
Did you see “The Cauldron” too?
Today I learned. Worth investigating even if I don’t end up using it. Thanks for sharing.
“It’s connected to the network. It’s part of the lab.”
“How do you stop your wife from complaining about your homelab? I dunno, I just bought her a sewing machine and she went very quiet.”