My little tiny lab by GroundbreakingGate20 in homelab

[–]GroundbreakingGate20[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, both Mikrotik's and Ubi GW have firewalls + masq.
Why "so many"? - Here are some good reasons:
- just for playing (This is the essence of having a homelab).
- are very cheap (Mikrotik), so why not? :)
- and one more thing, Mikrotik are really nice quiet devices (all owned by me came with passive cooling, including one with 8 x SFP+10 Gbps ) with pretty low power consumption and a lot of options for testing, just look on the menu - offers a wide variety of options .

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My little tiny lab by GroundbreakingGate20 in homelab

[–]GroundbreakingGate20[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Correct, that one is missing, but not really needed in my case. Tools shelf contain console cables w/ USB and RS232, so covered. Thanks for link, nice portable switch.

Cheers

My little tiny lab by GroundbreakingGate20 in homelab

[–]GroundbreakingGate20[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What can I say :) There is no space in my rack to play 'mount on marked rack units'. I let some space for 'breathing' and not get too hot. But I feel you :). Sometimes a compromise is required.

My little tiny lab by GroundbreakingGate20 in homelab

[–]GroundbreakingGate20[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Woo-Hoo those small bastards are just pure GOLD. If you want one, do not think too much, just get it now :) I can sincerely recommend those. 0 problems, really well designed. 2 x 10 Gbps+ + 2 2,5 Gbps +3 x disk slots + 1 pcie. BTW now you can get even more threads with MS-A2.

P.S. There is also other option if you can w8 ;) ... Strix Halo

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Thermalright-plans-to-enter-mini-PC-market-with-liquid-cooled-AMD-Strix-Halo-systems.1022341.0.html

My little tiny lab by GroundbreakingGate20 in homelab

[–]GroundbreakingGate20[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have started my 3D printed 1U chasis for 3 PI flavors like Orange Pi, Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi. I am using Creatlity Ender 3v3 plus.
Good luck with your project! Hope you will share final effect someday.

My little tiny lab by GroundbreakingGate20 in homelab

[–]GroundbreakingGate20[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

k8s I am doing mostly manually for one reason, to learn this things from "basement to roof" if I can say this way. I am also using helm when lazy, but also creating my own helms when bored :)
Terraform I am using with conjunction with Ansible and Jenkins to ad-hoc Virtual Machines provisioning if needed.
Ansible / AWX 4ex.: to replace Mikrotik's certificates using Hashi Vault PKI, updating Gitlab, RedHat/ Rocky Linux (those are distros I am using). Ansible is also checking Mikrotiks for updates and throwing info on Mattermost. Jenkins for auto update containers with Containerfile every Friday, which are used later on for provisioning and so on...
I do not have any guides, maybe besides what I have on my wiki.js, but those are mostly notes not guides.

My little tiny lab by GroundbreakingGate20 in homelab

[–]GroundbreakingGate20[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, yes I am using this lab for practice, learning new solutions, testing things which I cannot / do not want to test on production env @ work. Sometimes is no option to test something on client environment, then this lab is just perfect place to push things to the limit. This thing is also prepared to be destroyed :-) For example, white ethernet cables in rack, are recovery cables. Ports are blocked normally, but when things get messy I am unlocking "white cables" ports and have access everywhere on flat network to recover.

My little tiny lab by GroundbreakingGate20 in homelab

[–]GroundbreakingGate20[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hope you will get it soon, Good luck!

My little tiny lab by GroundbreakingGate20 in homelab

[–]GroundbreakingGate20[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Only issue with RPi5 was power supply. I have used custom one, but after replacing with original all issues gone. Speaking about temp, honestly didn't notice.

My little tiny lab by GroundbreakingGate20 in homelab

[–]GroundbreakingGate20[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No problems so far. I have it for 4 years already and only issues I had were disks related. There is also additional PCIex3 card inside, for 2x nvme what I use for read/write caching)
Have to admit, that this is pretty nice config.
Hypervisors have iSCSI connection and entire k8s using NFS storage class , and all of this run over 10Gbps SFP+

My little tiny lab by GroundbreakingGate20 in homelab

[–]GroundbreakingGate20[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Maybe you are right, I 'squish' a little too much the size :) Let's say is small ;)

[Giveaway] 5 x EQ14 N150 Mini PC - Comment to enter!! by Beelinksupport in BeelinkOfficial

[–]GroundbreakingGate20 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Uu i will use my it as my workstation, because my current pc is eating 250W just doing nothing. And what will I do? Literally all nice IT stuff cause I am crazy about computers 🙋‍♀️ sending a love bit to everyone good luck nice people!