I'd thought about doing The Year of Not Buying Anything for my homelab,
as I have a closet full of stuff. I think by re-arranging what I have
and repurposing systems I could have a lot more compute without spending
money.
I have a 4 core 8 thread 9th gen i7 desktop with NVMe and 64 GB of RAM, overkill for my needs now. That could easily be my main virtulization
host. My current host, an i5-6500 with 32 GB of RAM, could do just fine
as a desktop. The only thing it would lag at is gaming, which shouldn't
be a huge issue.
I have an old i7-4790 box with 16 GB of RAM (sadly, the RAM is maxxed
out) that I'd love to make use of somehow.
Doing some system swaps might be in my future.
My first project was to illuminate the inside of my server cabinet. I
bought an inline USB power switch for my Raspberry Pi that I didn't
need, and bought some LED USB strip lights at Daiso a couple of years
ago without having a use for them. I ran 6 feet of strip light along the
bottom of the shelves and wired it to a USB port on a PC with the
switch.
http://realitycheckbbs.org/images/homelab2600.jpg
So, from top to bottom, I've got:
Wireless AP
Thinkpad (proxmox1)
Synology NAS
10GB external USB drive on top of the NAS for backups
8 port managed switch (hidden to the side of the NAS)
Canon MX922 inkjet printer (found on the side of the road)
Yealink SIP phone
HP M175nw color laser printer (ditto)
Dell Optiplex 3050 (proxmox2) the monitor and keyboard are above.
Next steps?
I have an older Synology NAS that stopped working - it was going EOL
anyways so I picked up another chassis. After buying the new one and
fiddling with it for quite some time I got it working again.
I might take the drives I have laying around, fire it up, use it to back
up my NAS and take it offsite somewhere.
I would love to relocate the NAS out of my office, 5 SATA drives makes a racket. I tried putting it into the cabinet, but it put out too much
heat with the door closed. I need to find some way of getting cool air
into the cabinet and forcing hot air out, without making holes in the
front. There are holes in the back I could use to duct air from the
outside in, maybe that's the key. Right now I can get hot air out or
cool air in, but not both.
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