cisco – Patrick's Journal

Homelab Underway

There’s been a flurry of activity, and a false start in the homelab in the last week. I made my shit-tier vertical mount rack system and put it in my office closet and got just about everything set up. On the other hand, I have some trouble with the HP server I bought.

The first step to get everything working was to run some cables into the office; two ethernet cables and on RG6 coaxial. All three cables go from the basement to the office along the outside of the house. The coax and one ethernet cable are attached to the ONT (optical network terminal, basically a modem but for fiber optic) in the basement. This supplies the main internet connection to the office. The coax is disconnected for now, but I might hook it up and put my TV tuner in the office. The second ethernet cable ends up connected to the Orbi satellite in the living room for wired backhaul.

The new cables are on the left. I would have run them with the electrical service and fiber optic cables, but I don’t have a ladder tall enough. Just ignore all the garbage on the ground. It’s not a crack house, I promise.

I added a wall plate under the office window to nicely terminate the wires coming in. I used a backless retrofit/old work box to hold everything in place.

Not quite straight, but it gets the job done.

The upper ethernet cable is the internet supply from the ONT, and it goes to the new pfSense router across the room.

The HP desktop is the “router.” The Orbi is now acting just as a wifi access point. The gold thing is a Raspberry Pi 4 B 2GB which is currently serving up this website.

The HP ProDesk 400 G1 (what a name 🙄) desktop has an HP NC365T four-port NIC that handles the in and out for pfSense. Speaking of the software, I’m actually virtualizing pfSense. I’m using Proxmox as the hypervisor. Proxmox is a common choice for homelabbers, but it doesn’t seem to be as popular as ESXi. Most homelabbers use the same hardware and software as their work does, and almost no business uses Proxmox. I picked Proxmox because it’s free and open source with no limitations on its capabilities. ESXi places limitations on what you can do with the free version of the software, and I don’t want to pay the yearly subscription to use everything. On the other hand, I probably don’t need everything in the paid version. Anyways, it’s Proxmox for now. I set up pfSense as a virtual machine within Proxmox and assigned it two ports from the NC365T to do the routing.

I’m also running a Pi-Hole on the HP desktop inside a Ubuntu virtual machine. I was initially using Debian, but I ran into problems that I may have erroneously attributed to Debian. I still have trouble with the Chrome browser on my desktop while running on Ubuntu. Firefox on the same computer works perfectly. I never had any problems with any browser when running on a Raspberry Pi. Pi-Hole had a big 5.0 update a couple weeks ago, so I might have to try Debian again sometime over the summer. For now, it gets the job done; the ad blocking is working normally.

The LAN port on the router is connected to a Cisco 3560G switch. I just finished a semester-long networking class with curriculum provided by Cisco (I got an A, by the way), so it seemed like a good idea to get a switch I was already familiar with. The switch basically distributes the LAN (and thus internet) access wherever it’s needed. The Orbi base station is plugged into the switch, and the base station is then connected to the satellite in the living room. These provide the wifi coverage for the house.

The shitty “rack” I put together in the closet. It works though, and the things are so much quieter in there than out in the open.

The network side of things is going great. The server on the other hand, is not. I installed the hard drives I ordered and put it in my rack, and now the RAID card doesn’t work. No matter what I do, I can’t get it to work. It gives me an error like the card itself is defective or not plugged in properly. I initially thought a dead battery for the card was causing the problem, so I bought a new card and battery, but got the same result. The only difference was adding the hard drives and moving the server. It worked perfectly fine two weeks ago on my shelf. The server was pretty cheap, so I ordered another identical one. Hopefully it doesn’t get killed. If you think you might be able to help me with my P420 controller woes, drop me a line here.

Overall, I’m happy with the set up so far. The only thing I’m a tad dissatisfied with is the wifi solution. The Orbi is a great mesh system for the consumer, but I find it a little lacking from my more somewhat more knowledgeable perspective. The big thing that’s missing from it is support for virtual LANs. I’d like to have three wifi networks: one for guests, one for things, like printers and smart speakers and the thermostat, and one for trusted devices like personal laptops and phones. VLANs would make this possible by allowing the three wifi networks to be on separate VLANs with separate routing and firewall rules to keep traffic out of the home network if needed. Commercial wifi gear like Ubiquiti is all about that stuff, and if I hadn’t purchased the Orbi stuff relatively recently, I’d probably look into some of those commercial access points. Maybe I’ll cruise around for some used ones on eBay some time.

Home Lab Update

I’ve acquired a everything I need to start my set up and I’ve been playing with it for about a week now.

The HP server is great so far, except for the noise. I know enterprise servers are probably designed with no thought given to noise levels, but Jesus, this thing is ridiculous. During the entire minute-plus POST process, the six fans run at their maximum speed of something like 12,000 rpm. It’s loud. If I was near a rack full of them all day, I’d definitely be wearing some ear protection. Once the fans settle down to 35-40% when the thing is idling, they’re bearable, but still too loud to have on an open shelf in the office. I’ve decided to make a redneck “rack” to suspend the server and the switch vertically in the office closet. I’ll be making it this week, so I’ll be sure to post some pictures. In other news, the server turned out to take 3.5″ drives, not 2.5″, which really pleases me. I found some used 3TB HGST SAS drives and got six of them, plus some drive trays. I’ll be doing a RAID 6 array, so I should have 12TB of total storage while being able to recover from two drives failing simultaneously.

I got a Cisco 3560G 48-port switch to connect everything. I decided I had to update it, and killed it somehow. The flash memory appears to be wrecked. I used the web admin page to try to update it, and that image might have been too large for the flash memory. I tried to format the memory and install a new OS over the serial connection, but I had no success. So I bought another switch. The same model, but this one has already been updated to the latest supported version of IOS and it has a one year warranty. I won’t even be thinking about updating this one.

The SFF HP desktop as a router is coming along just fine. I dug up an old hard drive from a MacBook Pro I flipped a few years ago to use as the storage for that. At 250GB, it should be more than plenty. The system came with only 4GB of RAM, so I ordered another 4GB stick that should be in this week. I could probably get by on 4GB, but why not double it for like $12? I installed an HP NC365T NIC to give that computer a total of five gigabit ethernet ports. I’ll be using the built in port for the Proxmox admin console, then three of the four ports on the HP card for pfSense and Pi-Hole. I also need to get a VPN running, and I’d like to use WireGuard, which I may be able to do right in pfSense. If not, I’ll get a third VM going on this router box to handle VPN duties and use up the last ethernet port.

I’ll be running some wires to get wired internet and cable TV from the basement to the second-floor office. It shouldn’t be too difficult, but I’ve never run wires on the outside of a house before. Theoretically, all I need to do is add a couple holes to the area where the electric service and cable/fiber connections enter the house from the outside, put the wires through there and then drill a couple holes in a wall of the office. I’m hoping to not have to terminate my own ethernet cables because it’s a real pain. Monoprice has some outdoor rated cables with RJ45 connectors already attached for a great price, so I’m going to try to drill a hole big enough to let the connector through. The coax cable for the TV signal is no problem though, I’ve used compression-fit connectors on those a million times.

I’ll be ordering all my cables early in the week, so hopefully I can get drilling on the weekend.

Starting the Home Lab

A little while ago, I stumbled upon the r/homelab subreddit. There, users gather to discuss their home network setups, often used for experimentation like a laboratory. I finally have enough money to get started on a modest set up, so I ordered some pieces this week to get started.

I’m currently taking classes to get a degree in computer networking. One class is an introduction to computing class that has us using virtual machines for something. Another is a networking class that should prepare me for the Cisco CCENT certification exam. I’ve become a lot more interested in the subjects thanks to the classes. At the same time, my home network needs have changed and I could use some more power and storage.

Enter the homelab. Following some guidance from the r/homelab wiki, I decided on a basic set up. For hardware, I decided to get an HP DL380e Gen8 server, a Cisco Catalyst 3560G 48-port switch, and an HP ProDesk desktop. The plan is to use a hypervisor (probably Proxmox) on the ProDesk so it can act as a pfSense router, Pi-Hole ad blocker, VPN (hopefully with WireGuard), and reverse proxy (probably Caddy) all at the same time. This router will be connected to the Cisco switch, where I may set up some virtual LANs. I’ll have to see how everything works together. I got the DL380e as a barebones thing, so the specs were up to me. I decided to go with dual Xeon E5-2450 processors, and I’ll be getting 48 GB of RAM (the maximum is 384 GB). These are both pretty cheap options. I think I found a good deal on some 1TB 2.5″ SAS hard drives, so I will probably start with six of them in a RAID 6 configuration and add more as needed. I’m not totally certain about this though. The server will be home to a few virtual machines. I’ll be moving my TV tuner card there, so there will be at least one Windows 10 VM. I’m also going to be running my normal website from there, and I’ll probably run an OctoPrint setup so I can control my 3D printer, so I’ll need at least two Linux VMs for that. I’ll probably also throw in one for Arch Linux, just because I like to tinker with it. Beyond that, I’m not sure what else I’m going to do with it yet. Maybe host some game servers for Minecraft or something or get a media library going. I’d really, really love to put my spare RX 480 graphics card in it and stream some games. This is totally possible, but I need a very specific PCI riser card to fit a double slot graphics card, plus a power wire adapter and maybe an extra power supply. We’ll see how it goes and maybe I’ll try to track down the special riser in the future.

There’s no real purpose to doing this other than I want to. The experience with Cisco networking and virtual machines might help me get a job some time in the future. It’s not super expensive at least, and it’ll be fun to have a ton of computer power at my disposal.