HOMELAB 24/25
Repurposing EMC 520b Sector Drives
I recently picked up a batch of enterprise-grade EMC SAS hard drives off eBay for a homelab storage project. They were dirt cheap and came from a decommissioned EMC storage array. I slotted them into a JBOD (KTN-STL3 enclosure) and connected it to a Linux server running Proxmox – but quickly hit a wall. The […]
PSA: Intel Optane 16GB Drives for ZFS SLOG Are Not as Good as You Think
I recently picked up a 16GB Intel Optane drive off eBay for pennies, thinking I was in for a big win. My hope? That it would supercharge ZFS synchronous write performance when used as a SLOG (ZIL) device -especially to help out some aging SAS SSDs I also bought online. Those early-gen SSDs turned out […]
C.A.L.C.I.F.E.R
Cortical Archival Library for Contextualization, Inference, Filing, and Efficient Recall Yeah, that acronym is a bit of a stretch… but you get the idea. Calcifer, or Cal for short, is my ever growing AI powered assistant written in python. It’s main function is to archive and organise all my thoughts, so they are browsable, indexable and […]
PSA: Running a Tor Middle Relay Can Cause Blacklisting
This is just a quick note to reassure anyone else who thought they were losing their mind because they thought there was something wrong with their firewall or DNS. In the end, it actually wasn’t DNS for once. This is not a particularly ground breaking or surprising observation, but good to have solid evidence that […]
Troubleshooting Very Average Wireguard Performance on IONOS
I’ve been obsessing over this on and off for about a month, and I just can’t seem to figure it out. The situation is as follows: public internet ———-> VPS <====WG Tunnel====> pfSense ———-> LAN/Server I have a Wireguard tunnel set up to route all traffic between my pfSense LAN and a VPS. This means […]
Homelab ’23
A whistle stop tour of my new server and homelab environment. I’ve migrated from XCP-NG to Proxmox and explain a little bit about my rationale. Apologies it’s in crap video form.
Weird Network Problems in XCP-NG
I have no idea what is going on. I’m getting consistently inconsistent throughput and latency issues. This is a post to collect my findings so far… Not very interesting to anyone else but me. Ping via PIFs: No problems there. Pings between VMs, using VIFs: Not terrible, but not amazing. Throughput tested with iperf3: Throughput […]
MySQL Benchmarks – NFS vs Local Storage
Recently, I migrated my containers from a standalone Docker node to Docker Swarm. On the standalone node I used a local VHD for persistent storage, but now I’m using NFS Docker volumes defined in the compose file. I knew I’d take a slight performance hit serving the files over NFS, but I was happy to […]
Optimising VM Performance on XCP-NG – domU Clock Source
My 11G Dell R610 is over a decade old – and it’s beginning to show it’s age. The price to performance ratio is pitiful, so it’s vital that I squeeze every last drop of FLOPS from this computational dinosaur.