It's happened three times now: I heared weird noises that woke me up. Over this and the previous day, I have been falling alseep mid-day and waking up from distorded-sounding notification sounds on my headphones I was still wearing.
My breaking point aint too far off at this point... that was a haunting experience, seriously. Too much stress and all that is really, _really_ getting at me. x.x
I have spent so much time in Excel as of late...
Sanity check:
- 2 out of 3 Radxa Orion O6 32GB units
- OPNSense Firewall
- OpenBao-dedicated system - SpacemiT MUSE Pi Pro, in the mail
- Pi-esque rack mount + keystones - installed, ready to rock; missing the Pi boards, which will be MUSE Pi Pro + Radxa Dragon
- Milk-V Pioneer for CI/CD and NAS
- Secondary 8-bay NAS, OpenMediaVault, has NanoKVM for full power-down/-up backup scheduling
Missing:
- >8 Port 10G RJ45 + PoE switch (~450-650 €)
- WiFi 7 AP (~100 €)
- 3x 256GB NVMe Gen 4 SSD (Orion boot disk); Unknown, NAND prices...
- 3x 2TB NVMe Gen4 SSD (Orion shared data disk; k8s Longhorn); Unknown, NAND still
- 4x 2TB NVMe Gen3 SSD (NAS, "hot" tier, mergerFS+snapRAID); ...yes, NAND
- 2x 4/5TB SATA-III SSD 2.5" (NAS, "warm" tier, mergerFS+snapRAID)
- 2x 4TB SATA-III HDD 2.5" (NAS, "cold" tier); Unknown, havent checked yet
- 1x ICY DOCK PCIe NVMe to OcuLink adapter
- 1x 4x OcuLink to PCIe x16 adapter - ultra-low profile (HLHH)
- 1x ICY DOCK SATA carrier - literally enclosure only, goes straight to mobo
- 3x (Orion) + 1 (NAS) + 1 (Desktop) + 1 (AI Server) = 6 Sipeed NanoKVM (PoE option, ~100€)
- Oh yeah an entire fucking AI Server... Dual MaxSun B60 48GB Turbo, AMD Epyc, 265GB RAM - highly unknown, DRAM.
- 3x 1U short-depth Mini-ITX case (Orion); 50 € each
- 1x 1U long-depth Micro-ATX case (Pioneer); 90 €
- 1x Multi USB Type-C charger for Orions (at least 180W, 60W per socket)
- 1x PSU for Pioneer - wattate completely unknown. xD
Optional:
- Desktop PC upgrade from R9 3900X -> 9000-series (32GB RAM and board, rest stays)
Goal:
- Orions will build Kubernetes cluster (k0s, NLLB + CPLB) to run all selfhosted things, automate them through ArgoCD, connect to OpenBao with External Secrets / Cert-Manager to keep them off-cluster
- OPNSense acting as a whole-network VPN router to sink my entire traffic into a VPN bar exceptions - and also link with Tor and i2pd
- Home Assistant for inter-device / inter-service and (local) smart-home automation
- OpenBao for certs, secrets and sensitive data, HSM backed (NitroKey)
- Pioneer to automate building and testing of all the projects I find cool, act as a NAS and CI/CD into oblivion with Concourse CI, using QEMU to go between ISAs if needed too. It may become my new BTC/CLN node while I am at it, and may run solo miners in the time between jobs...because, why not. Also a big maybe. But, XMRing looks nice.
I am inching closer and closer and closer to replace every single cloud-service I need or want to use with a local option. It's basicaly my "Project: Good Bye Internet". I already prepared one of the pieces on the OPNSense within a BSD Jail and it will be glorious. =)
Also, I will be fucking broke for a bit, but thats fine, because after this, I have the exact lab I want, for good, for real, and it's mine. No shitty -aaS will ever take this away. :3
Heck I might some day build a solar powered, 4G modem backed device to help me reach my homelab even when WAN goes offline or something like that - and to send SMS lol.
I successfuly:
- Flashed a FritzBox with OpenWrt
- Set up a bridge (actually a relay) between the WiFi and LAN
- Bought, installed, configured a Sipeed NanoKVM
- And stuffed the whole thing into my basement segment!
I can now turn this NAS on and off as I need. It's an Athlon 3000G, I intend to use it as my secondary NAS down the line (3-2-1).
THIS IS SO COOL 0.0 I can turn it on, off, get into bios, everything! aaaaaa <3 SUCCESS
"zsbl" means "Zero Stage Bootloader" and is the very, very first piece of the puzzle to boot the Milk-V Pioneer - which I now own.
user@BIGBOI:/opt/zsbl$ du -h zsbl.*
132K zsbl.bin
944K zsbl.dis
772K zsbl.elf
240K zsbl.map
It feels stupidly weird to just... compile your bootloader. This is literally the first thing that gets invoked after the CPU; it is what bootstraps the initial hardware and eventually goes to EDK2 / u-boot. o.o
This is probably as close to an IPL as Ill ever get. xD
Most people: Oh no, my Facebook got hacked! PANIC!
This lad: Oh no, my Facebook got hacked! Welp, I'll make it a song instead.
I SWEAR THIS GUY JUST FUCKING RULES HOLY SHIT
#tunestr
...and I wonder how many worlds apart we truely are.
I still can not buy a cheeseburger with bitcoin, heck, not even regular bread, coffee or my smokes.
Meanwhile, there's bitcoiners out there _apparently_ living this kinda world? Arite...
I have a Milk-V Pioneer at my table, 1.400 €. My homelab has been costing me a multitude of nerves, arms, legs and whatever else I could find. My goal to become fully self-sovereign is almost here but now I get buttfucked with DRAM and NAND prices.
Brother. I am gonna be so happy when I can close my rack door, knowing that everything I wanted is inside now - for real, for good, and most definitively. XD