Good to know. I’ll examine everything carefully. I’ve been debating on replacing my existing monolithic iSCSI storage configuration with Ceph, so maybe that will weigh in… Having something that can access Ceph natively is a big plus. Otherwise I need something to sit in between that can basically translate Ceph to iSCSI luns, which is just more complexity that I’d like to avoid.
A lot of things to consider. Thank you for the comments.
Well, I certainly don’t give what “class” I am any thought day to day. Only on rare occasions like this, do I even give it any consideration at all.
I’m part of the workforce, I do my job, I collect a paycheck, I go home and spend time with my family. I’m not complicated, I don’t subscribe to “hustle” culture, and I don’t have any need to be wealthy, influential or otherwise noteworthy to anyone outside of my friends, family and coworkers. I’m just not that person. Even inside of those circles, I don’t see any one person being in charge, except for my direct manager and whatnot in a work context; everything is cooperative.
That works for me, maybe I’m strange in that respect, but I’m okay with it. I couldn’t care less if someone thinks I’m one class or another. I work to live, not the other way around.
I don’t think anyone has defined what “upper” “middle” and “lower” classes are too me. I just take it for granted that people who are wealthy (passive income kind of people) are “upper” class, the “middle” class is people getting by adequately. Not really suffering, or fighting to “make ends meet” so to speak, maybe a bit of savings… And “lower” class are people who struggle to pay their bills, live in low cost housing, have few luxuries, etc. Basically, how much disposable income do you have and where does that income come from?
Working, with passive income sources, or not needing to work to cover expenses, is “upper”.
Working, with some disposable income, perhaps some savings, but not enough to live on to cover expenses, is “middle”
And anyone without any kind of financial safety, living paycheck to paycheck, only making enough to cover direct living expenses, are “lower”.
I have no idea if that’s right; nobody has accurately defined it for me. I’ve always considered myself kind of “lower-middle class” aka, still making enough for some luxuries, but without any significant savings or buffer for financial stability. No issues meeting living expenses… Kind of the bottom half of middle class, if you will. My father was the same; he was much better with money, mind you, and he was able to dedicate a larger percentage of his earnings to savings. He would forego luxuries and “upgrades” to save money… As long as things worked and the family was comfortable, he was fine with putting the money away. He wouldn’t hesitate to spend to replace something that’s important, like buying a car to get around when the old one was too broken to work and/or be fixed. But if the vehicle worked, he wouldn’t replace it just because it was a bit older.
IDK, I’m working. I need to work to afford to live. I’m almost never at risk of not being able to pay for something I need or want, aside from big ticket items (well into the thousands)… I’m just some guy.
From the brief Google searching I’ve done it appears to be possible, though, I’m not sure if proxmox skills will help me professionally. I used VMware before because I needed to learn VMware esxi and vcenter. I know it fairly well at this point.
I want to target a hypervisor solution used in large companies, I’m not sure that’s proxmox. Currently I’m leaning towards OpenStack, since I know some cloud providers use it for VPS offerings. I know enough about hyper-V that I know I don’t want to use it, ever. At least outside the context of Azure VMs. I can’t really do Azure cloud at home (they’re is a way, I’ve looked into it, but it’s very expensive), though my current workplace uses Azure extensively.
I’m just not aware of any company using proxmox as a VM platform, whether single host or clustered.
Can anyone weigh in on whether any of these can be used for a cluster?
I use VMware in my homelab via vMUG, and I’m sure that’s going to get destroyed next, so I’m looking for an alternative that can allow for running VMs across hosts using shared storage with migrations between hosts. I’d prefer FOSS, but the only hypervisor I know supports all of this right now is hyper-V. I really REALLY don’t want to use hyper-v… Most of my workloads are Linux, with a handful of Windows servers that I use for an internal domain and testing.
I have clients that use internal, but they do it as a subdomain; so internal.contoso.com
Any internal only domains that I set up are probably going to go the same way. I’ve used domain.local previously, and the DNS headache I get from that is immeasurable.
With so many things going “to the cloud” or whatever, the internal.domain.tld convention tends to make more sense to me.
I’ve been avoiding reddit, but when I go visit, I’m usually on /r/homelab or /r/techsupport (or something similar); most of the other communities have rotted away, and aren’t nearly as good as they used to be.
I use Jerboa on my Android, and it’s been quite adequate for lemmy.
As for the community, bluntly, reddit is overrun with repeat questions, so if you’re a regular there, you see the same or similar stuff posted constantly by other users. So far, here, with the community being nominally smaller, repeats are generally more limited in frequency. You also see more of the same names popping up more often and you can mostly follow people’s homelab journey. That’s nice.
I don’t hate reddit, though I hate their API rules and the decisions they’ve made regarding how to handle it… I just, don’t see it as the future. There may have been a time where I did see reddit as the future of this type/style of discussion, but it’s definitely not anymore. Reddit will continue to hold a special place in my mind for what it was when it was a good platform, but I’m waiting for everyone that’s still over there to catch up to the evolution that is lemmy.
I just want to say that I don’t love the NUC for homelabs; mainly that it only has one NIC. I also don’t like USB NICs because I’ve had too many problems with them dropping out without any obvious cause, and then working again by simply unplugging them and plugging them back in. I don’t like to have to be that hands-on with my lab, I just want it to work.
If you’re okay with the limits of a single NIC, then the NUC is a great option; for my homelab, I actually run a storage network, so I generally need two NICs; one for production/front-end traffic, and one for storage/back-end traffic.
Beyond that gripe, you could do a lot worse than a NUC for your homelab. You may be able to save some money if you get an off-lease Core i5/i7 business class system, and the mini/micro systems that are available are quite good, even in the used market. If you want new, I’d probably say the NUC is going to be one of the cheaper options, even considering the tiny/mini/micro systems that are out there. I’ve used several tiny/mini/micro for small processing systems; one example of this is a DNS server; in another case, I used one for HomeAssistant. Neither system relies on external storage (no storage network requirement), so they performed quite well.
I know most people don’t run a storage network, and just use containers/VMs on local storage, so if that’s you, or you’re just starting out, any tiny/mini/micro or NUC will do quite well.
Okay, so DNS doesn’t really work like that. The client will contact the first DNS server and try for resolution (namely the Windows server) for client.b.domain.com. The windows server, not knowing who *.b.domain.com is, will return that there’s no entry by that name, the client will accept this as truth (aka an authoritative response) and stop. The second DNS resolver will not even be given the query.
The way to do this is to have a master for the zone. It doesn’t matter if this is on the windows side or linux side, it just needs to exist. the master zone (*.domain.com) then dictates NS records for the two subdomains, eg:
a.domain.com NS (ip of windows server) b.domain.com NS (ip of linux server)
The window DNS then has an authoritative zone for a.domain.com, which contains all the records relevant to the operation of that domain. linux has the same setup, but for b.domain.com, which has all the records for the operation of that domain.
What happens then, is the client queries the DNS primary server for client.b.domain.com, gets back a response that basically says the princess is in another castle, look up the NS for that subdomain (b.domain.com), and queries the provider for b.domain.com (the linux server) and gets the correct response… at least, that’s how it should work. Clients vary from OS to OS, so the DNS server may handle this request instead, forwarding the request (though this may or may not happen, depending on configuration).
IMO, the best way to do this is to have a small DNS-only system which acts as a relay/caching server that everyone points to, it has two forwarding zones, one for a.domain.com and one for b.domain.com, with the records set to forward requests to either the windows server IP or the linux server IP based on request. There should still be a master zone for domain.com which has the NS records, which bluntly can be the relay and caching server. What I like to do is have a small linux system for this, which has a global resolver set for the fall-back DNS (I usually use Google at 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4), with domain.com defined, and two NS records there for a.domain.com and b.domain.com, pointing to each server, then have forward zones for a and b respectively. I would duplicate this, and provide two DNS resolvers as relay/cache, and set the windows and linux master servers (for a.domain.com and b.domain.com respectively) as non-recursive.
Super fast: recursive resolvers basically allow you to resolve non-authoritative names. An authoritative response is when the DNS server is the root server for that domain or subdomain; aka the NS for that domain, aka, it physically holds the records for the domain, and doesn’t need to ask another server for that information.
A bit of a hacky way around this, without adding more systems, is to add a forwarding zone to the windows server for b.domain.com that points all queries to the linux server, and a forwarding zone on the linux server for a.domain.com that points to the windows server. You can keep your current primary/secondary DNS entries, and both servers will be able to resolve both sets of names. The DNS servers will simply forward request of the opposing domain to the respective authoritative server.
Doing this “correctly” needs about five DNS servers, one for the “master zone”/root of domain.com, one for each of the subdomains (both a and b) and two for caching/relay, though, each of those should be redundant, so two windows and two linux authoritative zones for the subdomains, and two root servers - at least - to get everything to be “proper”.
DNS is fascinating and complex; I see what you were trying to do with your current setup, that the clients will try the primary, and fail, then try the secondary, and get a reply, unfortunately, that’s not how DNS works. It only fails over to the secondary when the primary doesn’t respond. Having redundant DNS is a really good idea regardless. What I do, is I have a pair of Raspberry Pi units on my network (currently both model 3B’s), which have BIND installed, and forwarding zones for my internal domains plus a global forwarder for anything outside that, pointed to google, as previously mentioned. They act as relay/caching, and anytime I want to put something together, either to resolve DNS names only available over a VPN or for a new subdomain or internal domain, I just add it to those BIND servers, pointed at the authoritative name server (NS) for that domain name and it works pretty well. You don’t have to do the same, nor do you need to do something similar. There’s a lot of good ways to configure this that will work. There are also some really terrible ways to set this up that will give you nothing but problems. I set mine up the way I do because those r.pi units are PoE powered, so as soon as the network is online, they come up and work, keeping my partner happy, while I can fiddle around with DNS forwarders to get my lab stuff working. When the lab is down, the internet still works, so I don’t get flack for screwing with the internet again. My main concern is to have redundant DNS that works whether my lab is powered on and working correctly, or not. So if I lose my lab, or lose a DNS server, the internet still works and I don’t get yelled at again.
Let me know if you have any questions or follow ups, I’m happy to share the knowledge I have.
I’m personally running an SMX2000RM from APC. I added a NMC2 to it for monitoring, because I’m crazy like that. I picked up the SMX2000 because I’m running old enterprise gear for my homelab. I have a half-loaded Dell C6100, a Dell R710, a Dell Powervault NX3200, a Dell R630, and a slew of networking devices, plus some utility systems, including a miniPC running Home Assistant, several Raspberry Pi’s (usually using PoE), a few PoE switches, two gateway/firewalls, modem, at least one Cisco ISR router, and a Synology NAS as part of my setup.
Very quickly, new house, bought the R630 for “home operations” which is running some internal to the home systems, such as a backup DNS, some game servers, and PCNS, all on top of VMware ESXi 6.5 free. I have the c6100 (two nodes), and the R710 running ESXi 6.5 from vMUG advantage, which is running my lab servers, including a windows domain (there’s a domain GC replicant server on the R630), Exchange, several Linux nodes doing multiple things, some windows server based gaming hosts, Plex, netbox, and mediawiki for documentation, as well as a LibreNMS for monitoring. Home Assistant is on it’s own Core i5 mini pc (either Dell or HP, I forget), which runs my new home automation z-wave network, another mini-pc running DNS (I just wanted a dedicated non-VM system for DNS, so I didn’t have to struggle without it while I got VMware working properly after a power loss), and the NAS is for personal backup storage, just a two-bay (8TB drives in RAID 1) for my PC and my SO’s PC.
I didn’t want all of that to go down as soon as there’s a power blip, and the APC SMX2000 was a good fit, considering we’re consuming ~11 Amps on the 20 Amp circuit I installed specifically for the UPS (~1300W). I want to get a second one, and redundant power set up for everything, including networking, on the second UPS (I’ll be buying another SMX2000 for the purpose), with one feeding the primary power port of everything (or PSU1 on the servers) and the other feeding all the backups (or PSU2 on servers), and I want to add battery expansion on all units, for a total of 6 battery packs across all units, and 4000VA of power available, each UPS will have it’s own dedicated 20A receptacle.
The main reason I chose the SMX2000 is that it has a NEMA L5-20R port on the back, which I connected a 0RU vertical PDU (managed, the APC AP7930), which has a NEMA L5-20P connection for the source, and provides 24x NEMA 5-20R ports. The plan is to have two, one for each UPS. I bought the UPS off of Ebay without a battery and picked up a battery from a local supplier (non-APC battery, but a drop-in replacement, with all the APC fittings).
Specifics:
UPS: APC SMX2000RMLV2U NMC: APC AP9630 Battery: SMX2000RMLV2U compatible pack from upsbatterycenter.com or upsbatterycenter.ca (I’m in Canada, so it was .ca for me - APC’s SKU for the battery is APC RBC117) PDU: APC AP7930
The UPS is capable of putting out ~1800W. My alternative was the SMT1500 or SMX1500 (I have several of the former laying around with dead or missing batteries), but the models I have don’t have any 20A outputs since they can only handle about 15A, I really wanted to go 20A for this, so I sprung for the 20A capable version, mainly to future-proof my power delivery for the rack, so I don’t have to worry about what I’m putting in there. Before moving, I had two SMT1500 units, one was rackmount, so the equivalent 1500VA APC rackmount version of the same, and they only had to feed a modem, switch, and the C6100/R710. I added a lot to the system when moving to this house, partly because this is our “forever home” and I wanted to kick things off right. I put the PDU on the side of a new 42RU rack I purchased specifically for the house, and rackmounted everything at the same time. A lot of thought went into which products to buy, I didn’t want anything brand new, and I didn’t want anything I would have to spend a fortune on to get working. The biggest expense through all this was the new networking hardware for the house, second biggest was the new battery pack, but thankfully UPS battery center is relatively inexpensive for that (still ~$400 for the battery alone, ouch). We have pretty cheap power here ( $0.182 per kWh on-peak, and $0.087 off-peak, in Canadian dollars), so I’m not overly concerned about energy use. I just don’t want the system to go down as soon as the power has a hiccup. unfortunately, my power provider has had several outages in the past year that lasted much longer than my battery lasted, so I’m thinking to look into solar or generator backup to keep at least my rack powered up, and maybe fridges and stuff. That’s beyond the scope of your question so I’ll just leave it at that.
The key here is: how much are you powering with this and how long do you want it to last. If you’re like me, and have a decent collection of things that need to stay on, a larger UPS like the SMX2000, plus a battery expansion may be the way to go, if you have less stuff but need extra run-time, maybe a smaller 1000 or 1500VA unit with a battery expansion is fine, or if you need protection against just small interruptions in power, maybe forego the added pack. It really depends on the power delivery in your area and how much you’re drawing. Part of the reason I picked the SMX2000 was because it had a connector for an external pack (along with the mentioned NEMA L5-20R), so I can expand the pack later. The add-on cards were a big plus for me, but I would have been happy with any network management whether integrated or not.
A big note from me, if you’re looking at (especially used) APC gear, is that you will want to make sure you apply any and all available firmware updates as soon as you can, since a lot of stuff on the used market gets deployed as soon as it’s received, and doesn’t get touched apart from that; once it is decommissioned for sale on the used market, nobody bothers to update it prior to sale, so update it as soon as you get it. This is especially true for the NMC modules, the interfaces had a complete overhaul during their useful life, especially for the NMC2, making it far more stable and far more capable of a unit for monitoring the UPS. I’m sure this is true for other vendors, but I haven’t really dealt with too much from Eaton or CyberPower to know (My employers so far have used APC almost exclusively, which is why I have a handful of SMT1500’s, all of which were destined for the junk pile after the battery went bad).
If you want to spend a bit more to buy something new, I would recommend something based on Lithium, as the majority of older UPS units use lead-acid, usually AGM. Lead-acid is great for cost, as the batteries are usually pretty cheap, but Lithium should last a lot longer, I expect to replace my Lead-Acid pack in my SMX in another 2-3 years; lithium should last 5-10 at least. Up to you though.