Homelab

As I’ve written before, now that I’ve retired, I can devote time to my hobbies. I’ve set up a “home lab”, what we home computer enthusiasts call our computer and router setups. This is different than gamer’s “rigs”, in that a “server” is required, and it’s not allowed to have disturbingly-illuminated keyboards and cases. The aesthetic is completely different.

We often try to emulate corporate data centers by purchasing depreciated business-class machines from refurbishers.

Here’s my homelab:

That’s a Dell R530 rack mount, with 32 GB of memory, 450 GB of mounted disk, and 4, Gig-E, network ports, According to ipmitool fru, pieces of it were manufactured in August and and December of 2014. I bought it off eBay summer of 2020 for $500.

It’s routing Centurylink fiber to 4 wireless routers artfully placed around the house. I run the chrony NTP server, OpenSSH the premier connectivity tool for remote login with the SSH protocol, DNSMasq DNS server as a concentrator, and an Apache HTTP server just to keep the morons who scan Centurylink’s residential service IP space busy.