Initial build out complete

It’s been a multi month rabbit hole updating my network for 10G backbone while building out my NAS and compute node (100G direct link). Sourcing was almost all second hand on r/homelabsales, FBM and eBay (plus random finds at home!).

I mainly wanted to play with serving NVMe over RDMA using both NFS or direct NVMe serving.

That’s working well and after I got Immich and plex setup, I’ve been toying with VMs. Got a windows VM running fusion360 and blender for some mechanical projects now.

Pictures show my two towers where they live under my desk where I work every day. The NAS was a fresh build but I repurposed a threadripper tower and watercooling system and put an EPYC 7H12 and a 3090 Ti in there.

There’s a small N355 sitting on top which serves as DNS, MQTT, and lab dashboard fallback if NAS is down. It also scrapes Prometheus from everyone, including a colocated node for data redundancy.

The networking at the desk is a bunch of microtik switches (mainly the one with 8 SFP ports, CRS309 but I have hex for all the IPMIs). And finally there’s a legrange/onQ nook where the core UniFi network lives.

Overall, I’m pretty happy. Runs quiet – I can turn everthing off all the way with the Shelly switches. It’s been a fun platform for random side projects and websites. Probably gonna sit tight on the hardware side unless I look at upgrade the UniFi switches to the Flex POE++.