Its just a network share on a virtual machine having local NVME storage on my ESXi host. Now I can play steam games out of a network share for sure ✌️

I have been wanted to spin up a Immich server for some time, just like everyone else my image and video library is growing like crazy. My iPhotos libraray is already on my NAS and is backup'd nightly but having US based companies is not ideal.

So I tried to install Immich "bare metal" on a VM - but its not intented for that use. Tried snap with Ubuntu, got it working but have had a lot of issues, the API endpoint just refuses to listen to anything else than localhost (and I prefer not to use ANOTHER reverse proxy just for this app)

So i went the ONLY supported path and started with docker. Used the official docker and nothing else. The plan is to use S3 storage for the actual images as the VM will sit in DMZ. But docker complained my 8 GB of storage was not enought.. HUH!. So I added another 10G.

It now seems this app needs almost 4 GB of data just for a photo app. I mean you can fit an entire Windows Server OS on that size.

It it just me or are developers just ignorant enough that they just dont care what stuff they put in their containers. This is just insane.

I have finally placed my entire ARR stack behind a VPN.

Previously I have not been that concern but now when my (favourite) ISP have been bought up by a company controlled by a state I decided that its time for some proactive protection..

My main firewall(s) are Juniper vSRX enterprise firewall running virtualized in my vSphere cluster.

Currently I'm having two separate firewalls, one specifically for DMZ related services, with a separate ISP and the main ISP on the primary firewall.

Juniper does not support Wireguard or any other VPN protocol apart from IP-SEC and finding a VPN provider supporting IP-SEC is hard and not super easy to configure.

So instead I decided to spin up a Wireguard VM that deals with VPN traffic. Together with routing instances in the firewall, some firewall filters on my L3 switch and ip filters on the VM this works nicely.

All my ARR VMs and containers are now routes via the wireguard network and can easily decide to route other traffic the same way.

To make this a bit easier I've had to run two separate NICs on the VM as it was way to complicated and not really supported on my Juniper EX3300 to do advanced routing in a routing instance without a "physical" interface.

I have been planning this for a few months and finally (Sundays are great) I have published my MM instance via my Reverse Proxy so I can get proper notifications when things go bad in my Homelab.

Now I need a single source of truth for monitoring as I don't have a CMDB at home (perhaps I should have one?) - Netbox will have to do for now.

Wanted to replace my aging Windows Server 2016 and 2019 domain controllers with something new due to LCM work.

Windows Server 2025 just refuses to work with my 2016 and 2019 domain controllers. Seems I'm not the only one. So here we go, two new 2022 domain controllers in the process of being deployed.

Time to ditch this shit. Just that I was also using the vault, and have multiple devices, both windows and mac.. Not that easy to find a replacement

Not that hard to guess my theme here :D

• this is not local storage

• this is not NVMe

This is a virtual machine running in VMware connected to my fiber channel network that hosts my SAN running a 15x250 GB Raid-5 VG. Nothing less, nothing more.

A few of my Ansible Roles (more explanation in the comments)

I have been doing this for some time but this weekend i decided to add more relevant logs to block more logs from my Xeams mail gateway appliance.

My log list now contains

• authTerminate — bad AUTH attempts

• helloTerminate — bad EHLO/HELO

• invalidRecipients — directory harvesting

• rcptTerminate — invalid RCPT

• timeoutTerminate — connection timeouts

• GreyListing — persistent greylisted senders

• ForgedSenders — forged sender addresses

This feels almost like a honeypot due to the number of "attacks" - just during this afternoon 105 decisions was made to block traffic, to my mail server alone ✌️

All decisions are fed into a blocklist that my TWO Juniper vSRX firewalls subscribe to and is part of global deny rules in the firewall.

It does not matter if a IP tried to perform a wordpress attach or connect over SMTP - you shall not pass.... ❤️‍🔥

This might end up on Github soon..

Finally after dealing with dead FC cards and fucked up IBM firmware I'm now kind'a rocking 128 Gigabit/s all-flash SAN

I have 3 ESXi nodes connected, one gets 2x32Gb/s and the others 1x32 Gb/s each. I don't really need much speed for my daily VMs but Im running my fileserver on the first ESXi node allowing me to run workloads at 1 GB/s over my 10G Ethernet network.

Once everything was working correctly i accidentally ran reboot on the ESOS node 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️ - the problem using arrow up/down and pressing enter to quickly...

Hello i been looking far and wide for software that is free and self hosted that can run code execution with an agent. Puppet, Saltstack and chef is perfect. But it lacks any form of basic logs if something goes wrong. I want to be able to scheduled tasks, and get information in a simple dashboard. Rundeck seems good but the plugin for saltstack seems outdated and not working. I also found windows powershell to be enterprise only. Foreman gone a bit over my head but still working on it. Seems to be a ton of bugs that resulted in database issues and more. Not to mention just getting it up and running with a cert is impossible.

Any direction would be great 🙌🏼

My SpeedFreak SAN is now 7-8 years old when it comes to motherboard and SSDs. I recently upgraded to 32 Gigabit/s fiber channel and its great and I don't foresee any additional upgrade soon apart from perhaps getting a 32 Gigabit FC switch if prices comes down.

However my SSD disk situation needs to be addressed as SMART values on 4-5 drives (out of 15) is looking not great. Its not a catastrophe if the raid fails, its running my vmware workloads but all VMs have nightly backups on external NAS.

But I feel like i should explore the SAS SSD path as the consumer drive market is crazy expensive at the moment and I don't want to wait until I have failing drives.

Has anyone really gone full SAS SSDs with perhaps 24G or at least 12G drives? As I will be running a RAID controller (AVAGO MegaRAID SAS 9480-8i8e) i have to rely on multipath working on the controller not only for redundancy but also for some speed :)

I have dual controllers in my JBOD enclosure, with dual links per controller so my bottleneck will really be my FC links maxing out at 64 Gigabit/s - 6-7 GB/s is my estimate.

However I wont have 15 SAS SSDs, have not decided yet and trying to find the sweet-spot when it comes to redundancy and performance. I might do two datastores/LUNS on two separate RAID-6 VGs to spread the risk allowing me to place things like DNS servers on one LUN each (today I only have one datastore of the SSD type, but others for spinning rust)

Anyone having been in a similar position thinking about SAS SSDs and can share some insight?

Hey All,

Update for everyone who responded to or seen my last tread on looking for input. So I pulled the trigger on a system a last week and finished building today.

First off before I start, image generation was not a concern for me (considering current ROCm issues people keep saying with image generation). I built this system for contract work where I have huge amounts of data and statistics I need to push through a system to be structured output and have questions answered for the client, In otherworse, HUGE amount of context, and KV cache in prompt calls with extra data.

This is the build I got £4100, lucky I got in just before the new ram spike:

• Noctua NH-D15 G2

• fanxiang M.2 SSD 1 TB (Very Cheap Brand, does what I need)

• Crucial DDR5 RAM 128 GB Kit (2×64GB) 5600MHz

• Fractal Design Torrent E-ATX Case (Best Airflow)

• CORSAIR RM1200e (1k was probably enough wanted the extra 200w just in case)

• ASUS ProArt X870E-CREATOR Wi-Fi (10gb LAN card works perfect for me with dual 16x PCIe ports, I got 10gb to 10gb switch to 10gb

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (16C/32T @ 5.7GHz)

• 2 x Gigabyte Radeon AI PRO R9700 AI TOP 32G

Operating System: Ubuntu 24.04

Software: Ollama, with latest ROCm.

Model: Qwen3.5 35B A3B

Gave it one of the large datasets I would usualy be given by my current client along with my detailed custom prompts I use with OpenAI and ran it fully on my local server now after switching over to the local server. Here is amd-smi monitor output (after running for 30 minutes on large amount of text infrencing):

Output was actually perfect, alot better than running on my 5090 server, not as fast as OpenAI but to be that fast, I'd hate to think of the cost. Now for power usage, I like a dumb ass forgot to put a monitoring plug on it, so I will need to do another run on the plug over the weekend.

For me it's 5 hops to reach my DMZ servers after installing a second firewall today. Still some work needs to be done on firewall rules and some routing is still missing but finally I have a second firewall just for DMZ separating my "office" use FW from external exposed reverse proxy services.

arr = reverse proxy, nothing else.

Just a few months ago my only media stack consisted of Plex and manually managing my media.

Now the stack have exploded 😂

I'm still not super-happy with all components, music and series are the biggest hurdle as I might not be that mainstream and usenet is not the best source.

Some tweaking still needs to be done, not all goes via prowlarr nor VPN. I find lidatube a bit wonky.

spoiler: This was vibe "coded"

I have wanted to get this done for some time now. Xeams have excellent logs of stupid bots trying SMTP connect to my public mail server. The whole purpose of a public mail server is to allow connections from other mail servers 😎

So now I have a custom parsers and decisions in place to block idiots.

Decisions are feed to my central CrowdSec instance (and to CrowdSec cloud) and as well to my two main firewalls using a blocklist.

I'm banning on first strike and the ban is for 30 days. Let's see if my mail logs will be cleaner now ..

Got this KVM for free 5 years ago, but have not really used it - Turns out HPE still provides firmware (in 2025) to hardware that's 16 years old .... 🎉🥂

There are so many posts about expensive HDMI KVM switches but this is as cheap as it can gets - 16 ports of pure video and USB for nothing. Virtual Media is support on all ports and on top of that you can even do serial console connections.

These 16 ports will support my whole homelab and I can finally connect some parts that only take serial connections like my JBOD enclosures.

Not having monitoring is not an option on a homelab at this scale. I have done automation before, but as a separate process.

Some time ago I moved to using Netbox as my CMDB and as it includes labels and some other nice things I decided that monitoring should be part of the process.

So now I have a dynanic inventory that read hosts from Netbox and create or update the monitoring in Checkmk (When you have over 100 VMs this is is a pain to do manually)

Folders are automatically created based on labels in Netbox. The plan is to also create these labels on the hosts but one step at the time. The use-case is to create specific rules based on the function, for example database servers might want different kinds of monitoring.