Self Hosting

Just how much services can an Atom C3558 hold? Let’s find out!

The core of my homelab is an Intel Atom C3558 on a Supermicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F with 32GB of finest registered ECC RAM. It lives inside an Inter-Tech 2U-2404S which is a 2U 19" format case that I put in a Lack Rack under my desk, accompanied by my Fritz!Box 7530, a TL-SG1016DE and a patch panel.

On the server, I run some useful services for me, but I’m also hosting some public facing services on some VPSes. The posts in this section will be mostly about how I setup my infrastructure in my (home)lab to run these services.

I’m running ~~FreeNAS~~ TrueNAS on the bare metal and some Linux VMs on top of that. I tought it’d be wise to give TrueNAS direct access to the disks, however over time this decision showed some drawbacks: Running bhyve of all hypervisors turned out to be not the most common and thus documented and battle-tested option 😅 But there are no problems, only challenges 💪

Or so I thought. Over time, I had enough challenges and decided to turn it inside out 😆

Turning the World Inside Out

Self Hosting | 20.09.2021 17.02.2023 4min read

As I wrote before, using bhyve as hypervisor has proven to be not the most battle-tested solution. To make my life a little bit easier, I decided to use Proxmox VE as my hypervisor and virtualize my TrueNAS box, instead of using TrueNAS as virtualization host.

Provisioning VMs with cloud-init on TrueNAS

Self Hosting | 11.04.2021 17.02.2023 5min read

The core to a home lab is some sort of virtualization, i.e. a hypervisor on which you can deploy virtual machines. Ideally, deploying the VMs should be simple and fast, and that’s what cloud-init was built for. In my case, running FreeBSD-based TrueNAS, bhyve is the hypervisor - which doesn’t make life easier, but it works!