HomeLab: A Personal Home Network

April 29, 2021 - Reading time: 15 minutes

Introduction

Over the years I have acquired various small-business and enterprise-level networking equipment. This allows me continuously learn about new technologies and practice new skills, and further commit to self improvement during my spare time.

Part of the network, servers, and services operate on a dedicated secured production-like environment with a segregated workspace for development and testing. Equipment and systems are vendor agnostic which allows me to have hands-on experience on different vendor products.

Equipment & Software List

Basement Network Rack

• Wall-mounted 9U Network Cabinet Rack from PrimeCables.
• HP Procurve 1810G-24 (J9450A) Layer 2 Managed Gigabit 24 Port Switch
• YuanLey YS2080G-P Unmanaged Gigabit 8 Port PoE+ Switch
• Ubiquiti EdgeRouter ER-X
• TP-Link Archer C7 v2 AC1750 Router (as Access Point) with DD-WRT
• Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB Model Overclocked to 2GHz with PoE Splitter 5V/4A and PC fan mod on 3.3V GPIO pin
• Cyberpower CPS1215RM 1U 10 Outlet PDU Power Strip
• Intel NUC NUC5PPYH with 240GB Kingston A400 2.5" SSD and 8GB DRR3L RAM
• 5x Trendnet TV-IP321PI 1.3 MP PoE Dome IP Cameras
• ISP-provided cable Modem & Router Hitron CGN-3550

Computers

Rickert 1

VMware ESXi 6.7 host; Docker Host #1

• Ryzen 2600 (Non-X) 6C/12T @ 3.9GHz CPU
• DDR4 2400MHz 2x16GB Memory
• TP-Link TG-3468 Gigabit PCIe NIC
• Gigabyte GA-AX370-Gaming Motherboard
• Asus Radeon R7 240 2GB Low-profile GPU
• Dell PERC H310 SAS HBA RAID card with flashed LSI 9211-8i IT Mode firmware
• EVGA BQ 80+ Bronze 750W PSU
• Cooler Master N400 Mid Tower Case
• 3x 4GB WD Blue hard drives in raidz1 (FreeNAS Storage pool)
• 1x Samsung 860 EVO 512GB SSD (VM Storage)
• 1x ADATA SU720 512GB SSD (VM Storage)
• 1x Seagate Barracuda 2TB HDD (IP Camera Storage)
• 1x SanDisk Cruzer 16GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive (boot drive)

Rickert 2

Windows Server 2008 R2; Backup Host; Dell PowerEdge T100

• 2x4GB DDR2 Memory
• Intel Core2 Duo E8500 2c/2t @ 3GHz CPU
• Toshiba 160GB HDD (boot drive)
• 2x 2TB WD Blue (Hot swapping to offsite location and mirroring)
• Kingwin Single Bay 2.5/3.5 Hot-swap Drive Rack

RasPi4B

Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB Overclocked to 2GHz; Docker Host #2; Raspbian 10 (Buster)

• Lexar 64GB MicroSD (boot drive)
• PoE Splitter with USB-C 5V/4A (power by PoE only)
• 20MM brushed fan connected to 3.3V GPIO pin
• Aluminum heatsinks on Bluetooth/Wi-Fi, Ethernet, CPU, and RAM chipsets
• HighPi ABS plastic case

Services

• Virtual Machines
  • FreeNAS11; FreeNAS with HBA card passthrough
  • UbuntuDocker; Ubuntu 16.04 with Docker
  • UbuntuOVPN; Ubuntu 16.04; OpenVPN OVA Appliance Access Server
  • UbuntuPiHole; Ubuntu 16.04; Pi-Hole DNS Sinkhole and Network-level Adblocker
• Docker Containers
  
  • Minecraft Bedrock Server (Minecraft Pocket Edition Game Server)
  • Bitwarden_rs (Password Manager)
  • Bludit (Blog Platform)
  • Portainer with Agent (Docker web management)
  • Factorio (Factorio Game Server)
  • YoutubeDL-material (Youtube Video/Music Downloader)
  • QBittorent (Web Torrent Client)
  • Plex (Media Streaming Platform)
  • MotionEye (IP Camera NVR and Viewer)
  • Home Assistant (Smart Home Server)
  • Heimdall (Personal Dashboard)
  • Apache Guacamole (Clientless RDP Server)
  • Caddy V2 (Reverse Proxy)
  • Speedtest-Tracker
  • Code-Server (VS Code on the web)
  • First Mile Label (Project by me) (Shipment Label Generator)
  • No Head Park (Project by me) (wdidle3 alternative)
  • Mongo Express (MongoDB Web Management)
  • MongoDB (Document-orientated DB)
  • PHPMyAdmin (SQL Web Management)
  • MySQL 5.7 (SQL DB)
  • resume-beckrickert-com (Project by me) (Resume Website with NodeJS)
  • kpugaming/kggbot (Project by me) (NodeJS Discord Bot)
  • rickert/jimprest (Project by me) (Convert Images via URL on the fly with NodeJS)
  • bloofare/rickert (Project by me) (NodeJS Discord Bot)
  • And many more in the future...

Rack Layout

Patch Panel Legend