Techno Tim Homelab Tour -- Server Rack and Network

so home labs come in all shapes and sizes you have some that are large server racks that can run enterprise workloads to others that are small and quaint and run just what you need at home some home labs are made up of old enterprise gear and some might be old antiquated hardware and others might be made of low powered raspberry pies so if you didn't already know i also run a home lab it's comprised of old enterprise gear old gaming hardware and some raspberry pi's too so if you're interested in home labs and want to see mine join me as we take a tour of my home lab and networking setup hey welcome back so i'm techno tim and today we're going to take a tour of my home lab as a quick reminder i stream every tuesday thursday and saturday so if you want to continue the conversation about home labs there we can so let's talk about home labs in my past videos i've hinted that i've had a home lab i mean it's pretty obvious that i have a home lab i mean i'm making tutorials about home lab apps to help you self-hold some services at home and throughout all of these tutorials i've sprinkled in screenshots of my home lab whether it be my proxmox servers some of my network setups my raspberry pi's that are also running some workloads but i've never shown the complete tour of my home lab i've always felt that i'll show it when i'm ready when my home labs mostly complete but what i realized is that home labs are never complete they're never totally ready and they're always evolving and so after i tweeted out a few pics of my home lab and posted on youtube you guys have asked to see my home lab quite a bit no like really you asked a lot and so i decided that today we're gonna actually walk through my home lab and so i'll walk you through my home lab and network setup but it's obviously not in here it's in the basement so let's go down there [Music] okay we'll start off with my network rack now as you can tell this really isn't much of a network rack but it does serve a purpose i think most people's networking equipment starts off with kind of humble beginnings and then kind of grows and that's what this did this is something i built myself so when we moved in i didn't have any networking equipment and the easiest way was to build my own i've always mounted my cable modem on the wall it's always worked better than just putting it on the shelf but you can see that i totally built this myself i took some two by fours some plywood i painted it mounted to the wall and then mounted everything i could to it it's a little messy right now especially the cords up top but having everything in a dedicated place sure has been helpful and it's helped organize some of the cords as well the power on the top isn't the greatest but it serves its purpose it's kind of out of the way and all the cords are tucked in behind and then you can see down below i actually have this little umbilical cord coming out the bottom and that's this sleeve this cable management sleeve that i bought that actually works out pretty well um you can tuck all your cables in there zip it up and tidy them up so let's take a look at each of these things individually first this is my fiber modem it supports up to a gigabit up and down which is super nice we're fortunate enough to have gigabit here in my area but i only pay for 300 up 300 down saves me 20 bucks a month and i never really use that much so that's where my internet comes in and we'll skip over my switch and go to my patch panel so this is a patch panel right here i put this in most of the stuff i put in about six years ago so this patch panel right here is a trip light patch panel it's only cat5e but that's all i needed to get gigabit so i'm a huge fan of wired networks it's not that i like networking it's just i like the throughput on wired versus wireless i wired most of my home with camp 5v that included a lot of crawling around cutting holes in walls accidentally cutting one of my radiator pipes and then pulling them all down to here it definitely wasn't fun but it was so worth it so this is only a 12 port patch panel it kind of serves its purpose everything from my house comes into here and then i have jumpers over to my switch so this is my cisco switch it's an sg 200 18 port they're all gigabit it's a smart switch so it has 18 ports they support 10 100 000 so gigabit ethernet on all the ports it also has these mini gbic ports but i don't really use them and it is a cisco switch so you get everything you would expect on a cisco switch most of which i don't use so then coming off this switch goes down to this little switch this switch is a tp-link switch it's an eight port gigabit switch but it also has four ports of poe so i really needed the poe to power some of my cameras i have poe cameras all over the house and outside and so this delivers the network and power some of those cameras it was super cheap it's unmanaged and it gets the job done and then you'll see i didn't have a great way to mount this so i just found these tie straps bent them screwed them in and painted it so next this is my hd home run so this is the hd tc2 us it's a dual tuner so this gives me free over there hd tv i can watch and record tv in 1080p and it helps me cut the cable i haven't had cable for probably 10 years and i've been running some type of diy dvr for quite some time i mean i was running windows xp media center edition that's how long i've been doing dvr on a pc um so yeah so this records tons of tv um it connects to plex and um this is how i watch all of my pbs okay so then we'll go right above so this is my philips hue hub this philips hue hub controls all of my philips hue devices so that controls a lot of light bulbs so it controls the color color temperature as well as the brightness and you'll see those lights when i'm streaming or recording those are all philips hues so i can adjust them so i can have my light mode and my dark mode and they're also paired with the hue play sometimes i'll turn it on for games but for most of the time i just turn it on for a backlight for monitors okay so on this rack last but not least this guy he's pretty important so this is my pi zero it's a wired model it's not the wireless and it has a usb network adapter so i have a usb adapter that's over here and so this usb adapter goes from usb to mini usb into this pi zero and this pi zero is using one of the cases i put on all of my raspberry pi's it's the zebra zero case by c4 labs it's really awesome it's clear looks like ice and has black and it's really well constructed every raspberry pi i have i buy the zeba zero case for it because they're just so fantastic but this pie zero only has a few jobs really it just keeps my home network running so i wrote some shell scripts for it all it does is it just pings my servers if they don't respond it'll send a wake on land packet so it'll try to wake them up with a magic packet and then ping them again if they don't respond it'll keep doing this eventually it'll reset its own network adapter and then reboot itself and it just does this all day long and this is just to make sure that my servers are on now i don't know about you but sometimes you have power outages and i have ups's but every now and then my servers could go down and this is the little guy that keeps them both on super cheap and a great use for a pi zero and so yeah this is my network rack it's pretty humble it started from nothing and grew into this eventually i'll rack all of this in my server rack but for now it's on the wall it's off the ground it's not on shelves and runs really good and i hope this is a reminder just to let you know that hey you don't have to have a network rack to actually build out a network you can do it with some cheap stuff from home depot and amazon and although it doesn't look the greatest it functions really well so this is my server rack this is a sysrax 18u four post open frame so i assembled this myself it took about three hours to put together it's super heavy and super solid it holds everything i need right now plus it has an additional 6u that i can expand for later plus i might downsize a few things but we'll get into that later but i like it it's great to work on it's very open air can pass through very easily but at some point i might figure out how to add some panels and maybe add a door to it but i'll figure that out later and if not i'll just try to find one on craigslist or ebay and then repurpose this one for something else but this is great for now okay i'm going to start at the bottom so the bottom is my ups this is the trip lite 1500 va smart ups battery backup it's running right at about half capacity which gives me 10 minutes of battery time and this is plenty of time if the power goes out to actually shut this down so i've never had the power go out longer than 10 minutes here yet since i've had this ups but it's definitely helped with all the brownouts and power surges that we've had here lately as well as all the thunderstorms that have been shutting the power off for just a couple of seconds so this does have a usb cable that i can plug into my server and then i can shut it down if i'm running on battery power too long but i've yet to hook that up i probably should do that okay i'll just work my way up the rack so next this is my netapp disk array shelf this is the ds4246 i got it off ebay and it's fantastic so i got the model that ends in six that's because it supports six gigabit on the set of speeds and as you can see if you couldn't tell from my social media post i finally added some labels to this it was kind of a nightmare trying to figure out which drive was which when i was having problems but i no longer have that problem so as you can see it can hold up to 24 drives which is really awesome this gives me a lot of room for expansion later on but for now i've only populated six drives so i have six drives in here there's the eight terabytes seagate iron wolves they're made specifically for nas and they've been running pretty good so far i did have some problems with two drives that were throwing some errors but seagate quickly replaced them and shipped them to me ahead of time so it was really awesome of them to do that and so you're probably wondering what does the connection type look like from this to my server well it's connected via an lsi hba external sas pcie controller so this gives me an external sas interface that i can connect using qsfp to a mini sas it's kind of challenging finding the right cable and they're kind of expensive but this disk shelf so far was totally worth it overall okay working my way up the rack again so this is my dell r710 server i bought this server on amazon refurbished so this is a fantastic server if you're looking for some old enterprise retired gear this one right here is pretty much maxed out and the reason why i bought on amazon is because this one actually had a warranty on the whole entire server i know i could have gone to ebay and parted it out all individually but honestly i really didn't want to put in the time to track everything down individually and then put it together and hope it all worked so yeah i picked it up on amazon and it works fantastic but anyways yeah it's almost maxed out so it has dual xeons x5670s and they're 2.93 gigahertz so each xeon has six cores plus hyper threading so that's 24 logical cores so you get 12 physical and 12 virtual it came with 144 gigs of registered ecc ram so that's pretty much maxed out and then in here it also came with six two terabyte drives but i outgrew them rather quickly so i've replaced all six of these with 500 gig ssds and they're in a raid 10. so it did come with a raid adapter and i'm using that rate adapter to do a raid 10 so raid 1 plus 0. so that gives me a stripe plus parity and all of this ssd storage is for my virtual machines oh and also this right here this is not the optical drive so if you press this button it's not going to work so the optical drive used to be there and i found this really awesome drive caddy that you can replace your optical drive and put in another solid-state drive that's the drive that runs the os which this is running proxmox so if you have a server and you have an optical drive and you aren't using it i highly recommend getting a caddy and putting another hard drive in there so this dell server also came with the idrac the integrated dell remote access controller and this allows me to connect to it remotely if it's shut down allows me to flash the firmware and i can even reinstall the os remotely by mounting an iso but i don't use it that often but it's nice knowing it's there and i can use it if i need to so this came with a quad gigabit nick but i've also installed another dual gigabit nic that my network firewall uses for the lan and the wan port but that's pretty much all this server does it runs lots of virtual machines and very fast and most of that hardware is passed through to the guests okay next up the rack this is a chen bro rackmount 4u server chassis so this doesn't really look like enterprise gear does it this is actually my old gaming pc that i converted to a server so this case is really awesome it's a 4u rack mount there's lots of room it has a full height expansion slot it also has a front panel here too and if you haven't noticed there's like a freaking laser beam shooting out the front you don't want to look directly in this because it's super duper bright but i have front panel access to buttons has some blinky lights usb all the normal stuff you would see on a pc case it has a fan right here too and a filter that i can clean out but there's not that much dust here in my basement okay so let's take a look inside all right so here's the awesome thing about this case so it's pretty much a pc inside of a case so for reference this is my old server this is the case that i've removed all of this hardware from it's the corsair air 540 high airflow atx cube case it's a super nice case it's all black it's pretty sleek has a nice window lots of room for drives lots of room for customization and great airflow and it has dust filters so if you're planning on building a nas or a server sometime you can get something like this it's great if you're just starting out so yeah i took all of that hardware and transferred it into this case so back to this chen bro case it's really great super roomy i bought it used and it didn't come with any fans it should have came with the fan so amazon refunded a little bit to me which was perfect because i just replaced it with some noctua fans so those fans back there 80 millimeter noctua fans and then i have a 120 millimeter fan up here and that's not two as well so about this build this is my old gaming pc so this is the intel core i7 4790k so this is the haswell i think it was code named devil's canyon has four cores eight threads so for a long time this is one of the fastest stock clocks you could get on a core and it turbos up to 4.4 but that's not really needed so this processor supports vtx and vtd so i can virtualize things and actually pass hardware through so this is all plugged into my asus motherboard this is the asus z87 pro it was a premium board at the time and it also supports vt-d which is nice and has some pretty quality components you can see all of the nice heat spreaders and they're nice and gold and black and so this turned out to be a nice little server build so in here i have some samsung 500 gig ssds for my vms and i used an adapter to get them in the five and a quarter bay and if we look back there on the left you can see a pair of video cards so this one right here is the msi gtx 1050 overclocked edition and you can also see it doesn't draw any external power and that was on purpose so really i just needed the end bank encoder off of this card this is the older end bank it's the pascal architecture but it's perfect for what i needed to do so this actually runs the 24-hour mixer stream it's always on rip mixer so now that mixer isn't around anymore i'll try to figure out something to do with this card okay so to the right this is the zotac gaming geforce gtx 1650 overclock i also use the nvinc encoder on this but this has the new touring architecture so this one right here runs my twitch stream it's a 24-hour always-on stream and you can tell on this one too it does not require external power which was on purpose both of these draw all the power they need from the pci express slots okay and then you can see here is my ram so i just have 32 gigs of ddr3 and that's really all i need for this server this server only runs two virtual machines each virtual machine has a video card passed through it and then i assign 12 gigs of ram to each which is plenty for these virtual machines and this is my second proxmox [Music] server [Music] so i hope you enjoyed the tour of my home lab it's nowhere near complete but most aren't and you can see in my home lab that it's been an evolving process i started out building my home lab thinking it was going to go one way and then i needed to make some drastic changes and start racking in a rack mount server and then i converted old pcs to rack mount cases and rack those so i'm kind of in between from where i was to where i want to be but i hope that shows you that not everything needs to be buttoned up before you try i felt that way for a long time before sharing this video with you but i realized sharing it now might be the best thing to do so that in the future i can go back and look at this and say hey this is how it was this is how it is now so what's next for my home lab well i'd like to get a rack mount patch panel i'd love to run all my network cables down to that patch panel and then from there i'd love to add a 10 gigabit switch i'm kind of holding out for rj45 and copper but we'll see how that goes and then from there who knows i may scale down i may scale up but that's the beauty of home labs they have all that's your needs evolved so in case you didn't notice this was just the physical setup of how my home lab is set up in a future video i'll walk through all of the software and services that are running on each machine so that you can understand the types of workloads that are running on that hardware and if this is something you'd like to see let me know in the comment section below and while you're in the comments don't forget to give this video a thumbs up and consider subscribing if you haven't already so thanks so much for watching and until next time stream on my friends yeah so i'm that's that's kind of like my my intersection of things i like you know it's this tech plus hosting and sharing plus gaming like that's my wheelhouse i mean that's half the reason why i start this youtube channel uh is because of just that but yeah so same thing with like my discord bots like for me that's like totally like i love it because it's like i get to build a discord bot um it's writing code then i get to host it in my own infrastructure and then i get to share it and then it's in my server so and it's in the in the gaming genre so yeah so i don't know gonna give it a spin we'll see how it goes

Channel: Techno Tim

Views: 158,136

Keywords: homelab, home server, home lab, homeserver, homelab tour, network tour, home network setup, home network rack, home server rack, tour, home lab tour, techno tim, homelab setup, homelab projects, home lab build, homelab raspberry pi, home server build, home server setup, netapp, Sysracks, Chenbro, convert pc to server, build your own network rack, lab, diy network rack, diy, server rack, network, homelab weekend project, virtualization, server, rancher, NetApp DS4246 Disk Array Shelf

Id: 23jbcw_n20I

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Techno-Tim]

I have been hesitant to show off my homelab. I see so many awesome ones here. I always thought to myself that I would show off mine when it is done. After saying this for months, I realized that most homelabs are never "done" and so I documented mine to share in a video. Hope you like it and I hope this inspires you to share something before it's "done"

[u/Sijyro]

Nice stuff !

[u/xguarino]

Awesome!

[u/xguarino]

Do you have your scripts that you run in that pi, in your github? Could you share with us..?