Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Sweet! Here's my homelab - https://i.imgur.com/QS0o4ni.jpg - I should self host an about page, too.

- Netgear Cable modem

- Edgerouter ER4

- 8-port POE Edgeswitch, powers the nanoHD AP in my hallway and acts as the backbone of the network.

- Raspberry Pi 3 as a dedicated pihole DNS server

- TPLink 16 port switch serves all the 'lab' gear.

- 2x R720's. One is off, the other is a VMWare ESXi host.

- ESXi is pretty light at the moment - running Unifi controller and a dedicated VM that just runs Elasticsearch for a side project. For a while I was heavily using it to simulate an AD deployment for a small business.

- Synology DS918 is a network drive and network time machine backup destination. It backs itself up to Backblaze nightly.

- Everything is on a simple Cyberpower 1500VA UPS. I can run everything for about 80 minutes without power, but if I shut down the R720 the runway gets much longer.

I got my start in about 2003-2004 by trying to run my own mini ISP out of my home during High School. I was doing everything over a residential DSL connection that only got 1.5mbit down and a fraction of that for upload.

I still remember asking my bud to help me 'test my mail server' which was a Qmail installation via the Qmail rocks guide. The machine was a Pentium 3 with 128mb of RAM. My bud Anand (Founder of Gyrosco.pe) sent a handful of test emails to it and brought it to its knees! Absolutely hilarious incident at the time.

I wish that I had more photos of that time in my life.

Can someone ELI5 why PiHole is preferable to an in-browser blocker like AdBlock Plus?

It's a single chokepoint for all DNS traffic on my network. So I do not need to configure any device or application to use it. For instance, my piece of crap Roku stick benefits from all the same ad blocking that my mac, iphone, etc... do.

There is also a lot that goes on outside of your browser. It blocks tracking logic embedded inside other things, too. For example, my TV cannot phone home to Samsung anymore to tell it what I am doing.

You can get really wild with firewall rules to truly prevent any DNS traffic from escaping your physical network.

Some not very technical reasons:

1) Run once, use everywhere. (Including devices without a browser, like an Android/Apple/'smart' TV.)

2) iPhones.

3) Configure alongside rest of networking, not clicking buttons to manually sync within browsers of the same type.

iPhones can run DNS blockers locally[1], and Apple has a good API for privacy-preserving content blocking[2].

[1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/dnscloak-secure-dns-client/id1...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...

Sure, but that's not (or equivalent to) AdBlock Plus, which is what I was replying to.

Specifically, iPhones cannot do in-browser content or domain blocking if the browser is not Safari.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/220/

https://github.com/ShingoFukuyama/AdsBlock_WKWebView_for_iOS...

Pi hole blocks at the DNS later, so non-browsers are also affected, e.g. IoT devices.

> Synology DS918

This might be the best machine I’ve ever owned. It’s rock solid, a great Docker introduction and runs a load of small tasks without issue or intervention for a year+ so far.

I’ve been really happy with the DS1618+ we have at work as as well. I especially like that you can use the full size drive bays with SATA SSDs as cache drives. Some other products (Drobo for example) only let you mount cache drives on connectors for that explicit function or purpose.

Anyone know offhand if this year is getting a refresh to the 1618+? I think that Synology has a tick-tock upgrade cadence with consumer product lines getting upgrades in year x, and enterprise products get upgrades in year x+1.

I've been putting off researching home network/backup devices, because I feel like it is a big decision that I don't know enough about. And they all tend to have bad reviews.

Is there a good guide to start researching that isn't a top-ten list with just affiliate links?

Definitely r/homelab links and posts.

> Definitely r/homelab links and posts.

Definitely have a look though the relevant reddit subs and by and large the relavant ones are positive and helpful, eg /datahoarder /synology /homelab. It's good to scan them pre purchase too - for example it's been interesting watch the Western Digital drive issues play out over those subs

There are some off-the-shelf solutions that are expensive and well regarded (eg Synology DS918 DS1019) but expensive. There are a lot of pretty nice systems you'll be able to hack together too. Freenas is excellent in this regard, but it gets into personal favorites very fast.

Don't you find the R720 to be astonishingly loud for something to keep at home? 1U/2U size servers are not really designed to be quiet. Maybe if it's way out in a far corner of your garage or basement somewhere...

My home test xen hypervisor is an older Dell desktop mid-tower workstation dual socket/8-core xeon, because it's reasonably quiet.

You can either manually control the fans with some form of IPMI tools or by disabling the fan offset (needs to be done every reboot though). Then it is actually very bearable, asuming you have good ventilation around it.

Could you expand on this? My SO is about to kick out my home lab due to noise, so lowering the fans RPM would be amazing!

https://gist.github.com/whalesalad/711d57bf4c3a37a5a5a5855c5...

This thing is dead silent. I have hard-coded the fans to run at around 1600 rpm (I think they redline around 12-14k rpm)

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHz_AIWMc_E

What shelf is that? And what are those foamy things for? Vibration dampening?

The shelf is an Ikea Hejne. I have a lot of them, very affordable and sturdy.

That is sweet! Yes cyberpower ups are really great. I regret not going 1500va as well.

just curious, why people rely on VMs and dockers so much these days? Is that because process isolation within the OS has failed + installation and DLL hell issues have not been solved after 50 years of OS design?

For VMs mostly because of what you said. And generally, the ability to run Win-only software on a Linux host.

For Docker, I think it's just the ease of use. Imagine a standard web service you want to host, consisting of an Apache, some PHP, a MySQL database and maybe a Redis cache as well. Now imagine how the software's author would write setup instructions. 'Grab this and that version of these things, install them, then edit these 10 config files and make sure these lines are in there.' With Docker it's literally 'Here, copy that docker-compose.yml to your server und run `docker-compose up -d`'.

Is that an RTL-SDR antenna on the top?

Yes!

I thought so! What do you use it for?

I bought it a long time ago back in 2014? to prototype an idea ... then it went into a bin and has been there forever. I discovered it the other day and thought I might be able to use it to try and find what is causing interference for my bluetooth and other wireless devices (logitech univ. reciever). I keep getting these bursts of what I am calling interference throughout the day and would love to figure out what is causing it.

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