This reminds me of when I installed my Dell m1000e blade server into my rack. As it turns out, the clearance behind the face of a 19" rack isn’t standardized, so a protrusion on the ears would have interfered. The solution ended up being an angle grinder to remove the protrusion, and then re-leveling my rack, since otherwise the holes on the server wouldn’t align unless the rails are absolutely plumb.
The multi port NIC can work, although I would recommend jumping straight to a managed or enterprise switch that can do VLANs. It saves on physical wiring and a managed switch often overlaps with other desired homelab features anyway, like PoE, IGMP/MLD snooping, and STP or loop-protect.
For wireless APs, Ubiquiti equipment is fairly well-priced and capable for prosumer gear, although I’m beginning to be less enthralled with the controller model for APs. They also can operate on 48vdc passive power, or 802.3af/at PoE, which might work nicely if you have a compatible switch.
I’ve heard from colleagues running Plex on Proxmox that core count is nice, except when doing transcoding, where you either want high single-corr performance or a GPU to offload. So an AMD Epic CPU might serve you well, if you can find one of the cheap ones being sold off from all the Chinese data centers on eBay.
Now with that said, have you considered deploying against existing equipment, and then identify deficiencies that new hardware would fix? That would certainly be the fastest way to get set up, and it lets you experiment for cheap, while waiting for any deals that might pop up.
Similar to your modem case, the fibre ONT on the side of my house is now PoE powered, because it would otherwise need two pairs from the CAT6 cable to provide 12v to itself, from a backup battery supply inside the house. Replacing that supply with PoE, this allowed me to centralize my network stack’s power source, so that a single UPS in my networking closet can power that ONT. It also reflects the reality that if my PoE switch goes down, my network is hosed anyway. There was also the issue that with only two remaining pairs, it would be impossible to realize 1 Gbps on the CAT6.
I also have PoE to the RPi1 units which attach to my TVs. These serve as set-top boxes with interactivity with CEC via the TV’s HDMI port, and are PoE because I insist on all my devices being wired rather than on WiFi, so might as well provide power as well. These use a microUSB PoE splitter, because 1) the RPi PoE hats mean I can’t fit into standard RPi cases, and 2) the PoE hat runs very hot and makes a high frequency squeal, which was unacceptable in this application.
Power cycling via SNMP on the switch is another nice benefit to having stuff PoE powered. In fact, I have one more application which depends on this behavior. I have a blade server which sits in my garage, that would otherwise consume a lot of standby power when I don’t need it. To fix that, a 240vac relay with 12vdc control coil sits ahead of it, so activating the relay turns on the blade server. That relay is powered by PoE, commanded by the switch, so whenever I want the blade server, it’s only an SNMP command away. iDRAC then communicates over the network using that same CAT6 that’s powering the relay, again recognizing the dependency that if PoE fails, the blade server is down anyway.
I’m only using 802.3at power levels right now, as that’s all my switch can do. If I ever acquire an 802.3bt switch, I might consider PoE lighting or PoE phone chargers, or silly things like that. There’s a lot that can be done with 60ish Watts. Note that the efficiency of PoE switches tend to be abysmal when lightly loaded.
Did y’all mean to say milliseconds, and not microseconds? Sub-millisecond power loss would be less time than one AC cycle, whether 50 or 60 Hz.
Anyway, I do recall seeing some enterprise gear specifying operation through a drop in AC power lasting two cycles, precisely to cover the switch to UPS power, at least for 60 Hz power. So up to 33 milliseconds. A cursory search for hybrid inverters online shows a GroWatt with “<20ms” switchover, so this may be fine for servers and switches, when the inverter is operated without any solar panels.
For consumer grade equipment, all bets are off; some cheaper switch-mode power supplies do very weird things under transient conditions.
I second this idea, if it’s feasible. As noted elsewhere in this thread, the lead-acid batteries in UPS units have a limited lifespan, even if not regularly drained. Solar and off-grid enthusiasts have determined that parity between overall lifetime cost of lead-acid versus lithium batteries was reached years ago, and now it’s firmly in lithium’s favor, mostly due to the greater number of recharge cycles.
Contraindications for lithium batteries would include:
high local costs for lithium battery packs
lack of space for the hybrid inverter, as they’re usually not rack-mountable
the homelab drops below 0 C (32 F), in the specific case of LiFePO4 cells
That said, breathing life into old equipment is usually more environmentally friendly than acquiring new equipment.
This answer would be incomplete without mentioning that Dell iDRAC and HPE iLO have a lot of proprietary functionality beyond what the IPMI standard requires. For example, iDRAC and iLO support rich KVM-like screen sharing, plus the ability to mount ISOs and other media onto the server. Indeed, so much more functionality exists in these implementations that a license key must be purchased to enable the most fancy features.
I will note that SuperMicro does simply call their offering as “SuperMicro IPMI” despite having a few of these proprietary features. But by and large, basic IPMI is an interoperability specification, with each implementation having their own unique strengths.
Looks like a reasonable deal. The mobo has IPMI, which if you’ve never used it, it’s a dream for server management. It’s no iDRAC or iLO, but it should work well enough for hands-off management.
From your description, this new box would not be necessarily have to be a full homelab-in-a-box but needs to be enough to run on its own, with possibly an umbilical cord to your normal homelab for regular syncing. The new box needs to be fairly user-friendly, in the sense that someone else can connect it to their monitor/keyboard/mouse, enter a password, and be able to browse all the documents.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is a NUC or other small form-factor PC, with capacity for your desired SSDs. On a daily basis, this would sit somewhere convenient, like a home or maybe off-site from your homelab, with only power and a network connection. But it would run an OS with a GUI – GNOME? – even though it mostly runs headless. All your syncing could be done with rsync or whatever, and neither your homelab nor this machine should require the other in order to function properly, retaining independence. This machine could then be easily disconnected and tested semi-annually to make sure that it will work properly when the time comes.
Good luck! Also, when you do have everything working, back up your config. And also check to make sure your firewall is blocking inbound traffic as expected, for both v4 and v6.
It does appear that you have addressing working but not connectivity. As I said, I’m no expert on OPNSense but I did find this thread which has some thoughts: forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=29459.msg14233…
In -> Firewall -> Settings -> Advanced. Make sure the checkbox “Allow IPv6” in enabled for obvious reasons.
As well as:
You just have to choose for hybrid Firewall: NAT: Outbound and add a rule to it:
Interface: WAN Protocol: IPv6 pass from any to any
This latter rule is… odd to me since there shouldn’t really be NAT for IPv6 to a delegated prefix. But maybe that rule is meant to effectively disable the NAT and allow traffic to pass straight through without translation, obviously after applying your firewall rules.
I don’t have specific experience with the gen7 series, but firmware updates ostensibly come as an ISO or USB image which you can boot in lieu of your normal OS to apply firmware updates. At least, that’s one of the ways I think HP would still support, in case customers are running neither Windows nor a Linux-based OS.
To rule out a cable-specific electrical issue at boot, what happens if you boot the server with the cables attached to the controller, but not attached to the d2700?
Np, it helps me keep my networking skills fresh and relevant.
I can ping things like google.com or just the DNS of 8.8.8.8 no problem
When you ping google.com, does this resolve as Google’s v4 or V6 address? In either case, this at least proves that the VLAN routing is enough to: 1) reach the system’s configured DNS server, 2) receive the DNS record, 3) send an ICMP (v6?) Echo to the default gateway, and 4) receive the ICMP Reply in response. If this works on v6, that makes sense since you have a rule explicitly for v6 ICMP to pass through. If this works on v4, I’m slightly confused why this works but nothing else does.
I can’t ping the static router address of 192.168.10.1, but I think that’s because of the rule I have in place that includes all private networks
Which rule was this? But more importantly, in the Wireshark trace, does any traffic at all from 192.168.10.1 show up as a source IP? The pings from earlier, they only need the MAC address of the gateway. But the DHCP responses should be coming from 192.168.10.1. Does anything else come from that IP? On a related note, do you see any ARP broadcasts originating from your laptop asking for any addresses on the network, such as 192.168.10.1? I’m trying to rule out certain odd situations.
I’ve got 1 collision error on the LAN, and 2 in/out errors on the vlan on the out side
While collisions are unexpected in today’s point-to-point switching topologies, if it’s just in the single digits and the vast, vast number of total frames are passing through without issue, then this is not a cause for great concern about your L2 network. To be clear, are you running 1 Gbps on the OPNSense interface and on all the switch ports?
Looking at the firewall config, nothing stands out to me as unusual. On the gaming rules page, can you include the 16 autogenerated rules? I don’t imagine that’s where the issue is, but it might be worth a look.
When your Windows machine is attached on the VLAN network, you said it is successfully assigned an IPv4 address using DHCP, right? Is it able to ping the router? Can it ping anything successfully?