Home-Infra

As discussed in earlier post, the hardware choice was ultimately simple given the requirements. Even top-level software choice (Linux running Debian) did not seem particularly hard, but then started the hard part: coming up with reasonable design for what to run there. The requirements (2023 November) As I had 2,5GB ethernet ports (finally), my main Mac and NAS had to be directly connected to the box I used to have separate 2,5GB point-to-point between the two, but using simply one port in each instead of two made management slightly simpler and less error prone ’Internet-facing’ part would need to be relatively static and not touching Debian directly at all (instead, something bit more hardened would be the first ingress point) Both rootful and rootless containers would be nice to have The more containers the merrier - at this point I foresaw about half dozen useful containers something firewall/router-y facing internet DNS ad blocker (e....

Background I have not yet gotten around to writing a proper description of what I am running at home these days, but now I am having a brief unscheduled interlude to rant about how modern software is configured and deployed, and how it applies to hobbyist or not so enterprise setups. Example software of note in my home This list isn’t comprehensive, but I am trying to get to a point by picking few examples from my home setup, roughly in the order of appearance to the environment....

Background and requirements I have been considering x86 based solutions for years. Ever since the 12th generation of Intel CPUs ( Alder Lake ) came out in 2021 I started to consider it seriously, but at least as of 2022 there was nothing on the market that fulfilled following requirements: enough CPU/GPU power to transcode 4k video if need be I wanted to get rid of separate HTPC cool enough to be passively cooled noise is not fun and I have ~fanless setup in my office (with exception of NAS and gaming PC, neither of which is most of the time running) at least 4x 2,5 gigabit ethernet ports I wanted to upgrade my home infra default from gigabit to 2,5 gigabit ports (and extra switch seemed unappealing at the time) At the time, the best possible option I could find out was Alder Lake-N based Intel N100 boxes, but they didn’t quite have the oomph (just 4 CPU cores) I wanted, and they were also reported to be quite hot....

I have had some sort of computers for a long time. Those are not particularly interesting, and I do not see myself bothering to write anything about them. However, the actual networking and infrastructure part is interesting as I have had to deal with computer infrastructure in various workplaces over the years, and reflecting on how I have set up my home over time brings up some lessons I have learned....