First of all, Merry Christmas to all those who are celebrating.
Network#
My network is already divided into a few VLANs (if you want to know more about VLANs, see wikipedia. They can be used to divide your network and provide more security. Each VLAN can (and does) have its own rules.
I have a new home server on which I have installed proxmox to run virtual machines and some containers. I decided to give them their own VLAN. Now my physical servers are accessible from my home network but not from the internet.
My current Homelab VLANs:
- Servers - storage, media server etc. Accessible from local network, Members can access Internet, Isolated
- Homelab - Virtual machines and containers accessible from the Internet through a tunnel, this VLAN is isolated - members can access the Internet but not other VLANs
- Homelab routed - Similar to the Homelab VLAN, the difference is that members can access the Internet via VPN and they are not accessible from the Internet.
There is now some time when none of my servers are directly accessible from the internet. I use a Cloudflare tunnel for them to hide my IP address from outsiders.
Application server#
As I mentioned, I have a new home server. I don’t have space for rack server (for now) so I reused old Dell computer. I added SSD system disc and a 1TB HDD where I put storage of my virtual machines. I also moved the git server from the “old” server there. Currently I am virtualising Docker in VM but looking for option to use LXC containers for it.
Aa adition there is nice web ui which allows you to manage all your virtual appliances and backups. And it is also easy to create Proxmox clusters if you have more machines and then manage them from one place.
As for backups, my Docker services are already backed up daily to an external S3 provider, and I have now added weekly backups of whole machines to an NFS share on my storage server.
Storage server#
This is an actual server that I have owned for a couple of years now. It is HPE Gen 10. It was a long time when I last made some upgrade on it and because of Christmas and I finally have some spare time I decided to make a few.
First, I added MVNE m2 SSD system hard disk, for which I used internal PCIe adapter. This makes the server boot much faster. I already have enough RAM for what I used before, so no upgrade here.
For storage I’m using 3x classic disks which are now in ZFS zraid1 which uses parity and is tolerant of one faulty disk.
I also upgraded to the new version of the OS.
Other things#
I also added some new Mikrotiks to my wifi network and a new CISCO switch. When it comes to Mikrotik, I love how much you can do with their devices.
At the end#
I also plan to update my Uses page and post about last year’s defaults. Stay tuned.
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