homelab-setup

Hong Kong is a pretty good place to live in, if you just rank it in terms of internet access speed. According to the statistic from speedtest.net, Hong Kong was ranked 3rd in the “Fixed Broadband” category in December 2020.

And with a very reliable (but relatively expensive) electricity supply, your homelab should be pretty safe and easy to setup. The only concern is getting enough space to accommodate your networking equipment. That’s also why my setup is not placed in a huge server cabinet located in the basement. Instead, it is just casually assembled and put under my desk.

Hardware

Okay, enough ranting about the situation and lets go into the actual hardware.

CyberPower UPS (Value600EILCD)

Starting from the left is the latest addition to my setup: the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). I haven’t fully configured it yet: it will only shutdown my NAS safely when there is a power outage, but leave the other devices unnoticed.

I have brought this from Taobao for around $50 USD shipped. The specs for the UPS link is as follows:

  • Capacity: 600VA, 360W (explaination)
  • Input Voltage: 230V (i.e. originally targeted for China region)
  • UPS Topology: Line-interactive
  • Battery Type: Sealed Lead-acid

This as baseline and bare-bone as a UPS can go, having the lowest capacity in the lineup. The unit is equipped with a USB/RS232 connection to interact with the computer and NAS to shutdown before the internal battery completely dries up. In my case, it is almost a plug-n-play experience. Just plugged the UPS in and turned on a few optional settings.

At the current state, the “1x microserver + 1x switch + 1x NAS” setup pulls ~50W from the wall socket. According to the runtime chart provided by the vendor, it should last at least half an hour of outage. As you may see on the photo, the estimated runtime is pretty close to the 30 minute mark. It also emits a “buzz” switching noise when I unplugged the AC power.

Sirivision Managed switch (SR-SG8808MN)

On top of the server we have the managed switch, one of the most important device to get the software router running. “Managed” Switch offers the possibility to further partition the network at the data link layer (OSI layer 2) vis VLAN configuration.

I have bought this model from taobao for $30 USD shipped. This is a cheap “industrial” switch that comes with only a Chinese Web-Admin interface. The terms sounds very unfamiliar and almost cryptic in Chinese, but I was able to config the switch after some trial-and-error.

Main features (that I care about):

  • 8x 10/100/1000Mbps RJ45 ports w/ Loop Detection/Prevention
  • Supports 802.1q VLAN (port-based, tag-based VLAN)
  • Support Link Aggregation (LACP?Proprietary?)

Without any link aggregation, the top speed of my intranet is 1000Mbps (~125MB/s). This transfer rate is around an average SATA HDD, not bad for a NAS application without SSDs.

HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 (712317-371)

This is the workhouse of the homelab setup. I have two of them lying around, but only one is active currently. I run a virtualized software firewall (Sophos UTM) on my server. It was a PITA to setup (as a beginner) and always causing network outage for my family. Now it is pretty stable and occasionally breaks Steam game connections.

I got it very cheap ~$80 USD each 2nd hand from my colleague when he was updating his setup. A big thanks to him as he also offered a lot of recommendations together with the hardware.

Upgrades to the setup:

  • Swapped the CPU to a 4C8T Xeon Processor
  • Using SATA SSDs -> good balance between performance & price
  • Extra electrostatic air filter for anti-dust measures
  • Running Windows Server 2019 w/ Hyper-V

Things that I like about the setup:

  • ILO/IPMI for easy access and management
  • 2x native networking port, very useful paired with VLAN
  • Quiet: single fan w/ passive heatsink, unnoticeable with silent profile
  • Stylish Look w/ metal parts, good build quality
  • Popular w/ DIY upgrades, versatile chassis

Synology 4-bay NAS (DS416play)

This holds all the data I accumulated since 1st grade. Have been into data hoarding for a few years now and digitalize quite a lot of my paper collection. I also have multiple backups following the “3-2-1” strategy, but that will be the content of another post.

I got it very cheap ~$80 USD used also from my colleague, such a huge bargain! The hardware is in mint condition without even a scratch. Running 24/7, dust build up very fast inside. I bought 2x 7200rpm 3TB regular HDD and configured it for redundancy (so 3TB actually available).

The Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) is pretty reliable. They are well-documented with a whole bunch of official tutorials and a very wide & active community. The system and plugins receive regular updates and so far running without any problems.

(Offscreen) Netgear WiFi router (R6220)

This is the oldest piece of hardware in the setup. Although having a all-plastic build, the router is pretty reliable and got well ventilated.

I got this at ~60 USD a few years ago and it have been running 24/7 without any issues. I have very good experience with the Netgear brand. The webadmin interface is straight-forward and I didn’t encounter any connection issues. Typically the WiFi connection is around 300~600Mbps, and never hitting advertised 900/1200Mbps limit. It has a very naive implementation of USB media server, support for No-IP DDNS service. Both of them are not quite useful as I have got a proper home server behind that.

With the Sophos UTM acting as a software router, the WiFi router is put into Access Point mode, with all the DHCP/NAT managed by the server. The UTM therefore can monitor all the connections and inspect the traffic. In this way, I can configure firewall rules at a per-device level if I wanted.

Closing Thoughts

Next time I should write more about the software side of thing, and show that 2 networking port should be enough for typical usage.

I also saw lots of fancy network diagram on r/homelab subreddit, so I am going to made one myself next time.



Links/Further Readings: