HomeLab Updates 01/03/25

HAPPY New Year Everyone! New Lab updates for you.

• Reconfigure Network/Server closet
  • Currently in-progress. 4/5 mini pcs are mounted and functional on the network. Still finding a place for the other one that works for getting access to it.
  • Still waiting on the time to move the racks and reconfigure the mounting of those. 2 racks are currently in there and I need to mount pcs and switches in them as well as PDUs.
  • Relocate power outlet and potentially have one more power outlet dropped for the inside of the cabinet.
• Ethernet Drops
  • Still pending on my 4 ethernet drops. Temporary solutions are in place.
• Cooling
  • Server closet is getting a little warm for my comfort with me needing to turn on the heat in my house. CPU temps are hovering around 100 degrees C which is a bit too high.
  • Options are: During the winter, relocate the racks to the Garage. During the summer, put them back in the closet.
    • More preferred option, create an individually cooled closet or rack in the garage that is cooled by a mini split or window AC in order to keep everything cool.
• New Services
  • Working on a few things at the moment that are stumping me pretty hard.
    • Authentik/keycloak
      • Working on figuring out which solution is best for what I need and how easy each are to setup for SSO
    • LDAP
      • Microsoft AD cannot be used exclusively for this since I do need LDAP functionality for some of the services that lock Microsoft AD behind a paywall.
  • Need a better solution for a dashboard
• Research
  • Researching a new tool for automating the Media Aggregation stack.
    • Having trouble with this since I do not use RAID or have enough disks to run RAID. The endgame solution I believe will work is to create a disk pool that uses SMB using TruNAS Scale or Unraid and then mounting said shares to the linux machine. The only problem is link speed to the switch and plex machine. For this to be viable, I would want a 10G connection between them so that It doesn’t take a year to move plex data.

Updates here are complete. These are the things that I will be working on all year. Some of them might take that long, especially the LDAP and the OID setup for SSO. It can take me some time before things click in my mind. Just need to tinker with it until it works.

Here’s to another good year.