Dennis Schmalacker

When I last wrote about my homelab, I was running 3 microservers with different tasks.

Intro Over a year ago I invested into an Optiplex 3050 Micro.

It has been a few months since I looked at my homelab infrastructure in all it’s glory and marvel at how much fun I am having.

Just like in construction, we use repeatable processes to build our infrastructure.* Intro Okay, okay, okay.

When booting, it is important to have the right boot order.* Intro After getting to know Debian pre-seeding in an effort to make installing an OS more consistent, I knew I wanted to go one step further.

Just like starting off your tomato fruits in a starter tray, you can preseed Debian for a standardised install﹡ The centerpieces of my homelab, next to a new Optiplex 3050 SFF, a Banana Pi R3 or a Mikrotik RBM11G, are my 3 HPE Microserver Gen8.

When you have the chance of 10 Gbit/s Internet at home, you take it, don't you?

In 2023 nearly all services we use are Software as a Service (SaaS), which means even if there are Desktop clients, the data most likely is still stored in “the cloud”.

Like Birds migrating, I am migrating my single node k3s cluster﹡ The intro to the migration Two years ago I was running my private kubernetes cluster using microK8s on a Hetzner cloud server.

Mikrotik RBM11G and a AW7916-NPD running OpenWRT The intro A few moons ago, when I started building out my home network, I bought an AsiaRF AW7916-NPD miniPCIe card as a way to build my own wifi router.

The HPE Microserver Gen8 is a great little machine The intro to the HPE Microserver Gen8 As a big fan of the HP Microserver Gen8 I already have 3 of them.

As a long-time dabbler in Linux, server administration, and system management, I have always been interested in building my own more complex homelab.

Hi, my name is Dennis Schmalacker.