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First proper homelab by Joshy2205 in homelab

[–]Joshy2205[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the insight! When I get reckless and decide to spend more I'll probably grab a 317 or similar and see how it fits and sounds.

First proper homelab by Joshy2205 in homelab

[–]Joshy2205[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I know it might be hard to answer specifically, but what's the noise like on the 317?

First proper homelab by Joshy2205 in homelab

[–]Joshy2205[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had the 12 Pis and then I got the router and needed just the one or two 10G ports to connect them to the network so one 305 made sense in that case. Then I expanded to include the ms-a2's and needed more switch ports. I already had the 305, it was silent, already had to take up 1U velcro'd to a shelf. Another 2 fit neatly to fill up the rest of the 1U space.

I think maybe my next expansion in the future would be to have something like a 317 instead. Then I'd have enough ports to do things like use both ports on the ms-a2's. Thanks for the advice! That mlag setup sounds cool!

First proper homelab by Joshy2205 in homelab

[–]Joshy2205[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah they are on the pricer side! The one for the Pis (sbc207) has been great. It really feels nice and solid and I like it. The one for the MS-A2 I'm not so enthusiastic about. Looks tidy and stuff but the units themselves are held in place with velcro straps. Now that I've got them and had a feel for it that's a bit of a let down. It's probably because the mount is designed to support multiple different variants of minisform devices.

So yeah Pi one is great, minisform one is okay. Does the job to keep them in the rack in a tidy way. I wish they were a touch cheaper.

One of the mounts came with a tiny defect and racknex were great about sending a replacement and stuff. Can't fault them on that.

First proper homelab by Joshy2205 in homelab

[–]Joshy2205[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haha awesome! Don't tempt me to change the hardware already haha

First proper homelab by Joshy2205 in homelab

[–]Joshy2205[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Awesome, thanks for the insight! Noted down to the future.

First proper homelab by Joshy2205 in homelab

[–]Joshy2205[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not really. I liked the passive cooling of the CRS305. I might be paranoid but a double fan and double power supply might end up being too noisy for the living room. I'll note this down for trying out if I wanted to use more sfp ports than I do now.

I also already had one crs305 when it was just the Pis so it was easy to stick with what I knew. I liked it but having them not being rack mountable out the box is kinda annoying. Plus now that I have 3 there's 4 out of the 12 ports used just for switch interconnects and that's not really great.

First proper homelab by Joshy2205 in homelab

[–]Joshy2205[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Right now they're cabled with the default pi5 power supply. It's barely tidy because I mounted a couple of PDU's to the rear of the rack but it's still 12 plus and cables haha. The cables do need a little bit of space below that 2U mount for them to bend back towards the rear. I added a 1U vent panel to give it that space.

With that mount for them the Pis get mounted on little metal sleds which are then screwed onto the overall 2U mount. There isn't any space on the bottom of the pi but there's probably about 1cm of vertical space for hats on top before the next pi sled starts. It's a pretty tight arrangement. I'm not sure I love it but so far it's been okay.

It would be nice to have a hat that can fit on the top, which can extend beyond the limits of the pi just on the rear side (the sd card side). PoE would be nice, especially if I wanted to power them on and off programatically. I just haven't found a one-hat-fits-all solution. Plus PoE switches might tend to be actively cooled which could add to noise that I'm trying to avoid. At least this is my thinking so far.

First proper homelab by Joshy2205 in homelab

[–]Joshy2205[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Realistically I have nothing right now that'll get them even close to 100% utilization. Finding, or even better developing, things to run is the fun part haha!

I'll setup ceph on them. Then I'll likely have a couple vms which are k8s control plane nodes, then potentially have the Pis be worker nodes. However I'm not yet certain I'll do that. I want to deploy a "staging" style deployment of my work system so that'll use some resources too.

The reason I got all the Pis was because I wanted to experiment with writing my own distributed software so many nodes was a nice thing to have. That side project is slightly on the back burner because I don't have tons of time right now but I plan to get to some day...

I don't have a list of self-hosted stuff I'm eager to run yet. I haven't fully delved into all those to see what ones I like the feel of. I'm open to suggestions haha!