So, new project.  I have a lot of those.  Often they start with grandiose plans and get abandoned once the harsh reality of implementing them smacks me in the face like some sort of wet, soggy face-smacking thing.

New NEW project: work on my metaphor game.

But back to the original:

A few months ago, I got laid off.  It wasn’t entirely unexpected, and if I’m completely honest not entirely unwelcome.  I had been doing technical support for a Major Software company, and due to a quirk of fate had been granted access to all sorts of metrics that the rank and file weren’t supposed to be seeing, due to being all rank and… filthy, as it were.

And those metrics showed me that we simply were not getting enough work to justify the number of people that were getting paychecks.  They also showed me some AMAZING ways that people were using to pad their metrics, some of which I may make use of in future if I ever feel entirely without scruples.

I tried to write “unscrupled” there, but autocorrect made me take it back.  In my opinion, it is an awesome word and should enter the English language post-haste.

But I digress.  Short version, when I got the 9 AM “hey can you join me in a quick zoom call?” from my manager’s manager it did not come as a shock.  The rest of the day was mostly spent tidying up loose ends and commiserating with the rest of the team because a whole lot of us were getting those quick zoom calls.

Including my manager, hence the level skip on the meeting request.  Nice enough guy, hope he’s doing well.

Anyway, I took advantage of my sudden freedom to get rid of a small mountain of computer hardware that I had been maintaining as a home lab, because suddenly I no longer needed a half-dozen servers of various types and a shelf of obsolete laptops.

It was extremely satisfying.

However, life continues to happen.  And, while I am enjoying the freedom of not punching a clock every day, I should probably do something to get health insurance again.  Hence, I am applying for jobs.

This hasn’t been an incredibly productive process, but I did get an interview where one of the interviewers asked me, with the sort of air of someone asking something incredibly obvious, “so, describe your home lab for me.”

This is actually a fair question!  Someone in my field could reasonably be expected to have such a thing, and it immediately struck me that “actually I got rid of it” would not be the best of answers.

Instead, I quickly described my home lab as it HAD been, and the interview continued.

I didn’t get that job.  But it did make me realize that I probably needed to have some hardware around the house to make test boxes out of again.

I just didn’t want to wind up with another stack of decommissioned business PCs.  I mean, they’re cheap and easy to come by but they do take up space.

Instead, I threw together this thing, which as of yet does not have a clever name.

It’s… well, about half new parts and half parts that I scavenged from other systems.  It’s got an i5-12400 that used to be the guts of my gaming PC, an 8TB HDD that got pulled out of my NAS the last time I upgraded it, a 1TB SSD that used to be in a PS5, 32GB of extremely cheap RAM, some Noctua fans because I broke the stock Intel CPU cooler while installing it and then decided that I would replace the case fans while I was ordering a new CPU cooler, and a 1000 watt Corsair power supply that is the definition of overkill but also the only power supply I had on hand.

Oh, and a brand new modern mini ITX board that supports Intel 12th through 14th gen processors but has honest-to-god VGA and PS/2-style connectors on the back panel.  I don’t know if I’ll ever need them but I figured some legacy connectors wouldn’t be awful to have in a server.

All of this is in a cheap Rosewill 2U server case because I am going to rack mount this bad boy.  It will not live on this card table for much longer.

(In three months, it will still be on the card table.  Bet.)

It was not the world’s easiest case to work in, mostly because the cables for this power supply are far too long and Corsair does not sell shorter ones, but I eventually got everything jammed together.  There are some stability issues if I turn on memory overclocking, but otherwise it’s been up and running for the best part of the last two weeks.

Hardware is the easy part, though.  I needed some software to pull it all together and to look good on a resume.  So here’s what I have going on so far:

On the bare metal, I’m running Proxmox.  This seemed like the best option for a hypervisor.  I didn’t want to go anywhere near ESXi right now, and while I have plenty of Windows licenses lying around I didn’t want to deal with Hyper-V either.

Next, there are two Linux VMs.  One is running Ubuntu and the other Rocky Linux.  If I were a proper nerd, one would be Arch.

I don’t hate myself that much. Apologies to Arch fans, and may your fursuits be ever well-ventilated and free of parasites.

After the Linux VMs, I have an Unraid VM.  That’s probably just another Linux VM, really, but it’s Linux with a more user-friendly exterior and a licensing fee – and also with a requirement to boot off a USB drive, because reasons.  Fortunately, Proxmox let me pass through a USB drive so I didn’t have to dedicate hardware to it.

I also told Proxmox to pass through the on-board SATA controller to Unraid.  So, from the Unraid server’s perspective, it has a 128GB “cache” drive (this is a virtual disk) and an 8TB “array” drive (this is a physical disk).

Yes, I know.  I should have a redundant drive in there.  It may happen.

On Unraid, I’m running Docker for apps.  So far I just have Jellyfin running there, mostly as a test.  I can’t move my entire media library over to it, because I have a great deal of media that I’ve bought from iTunes and no media server except Apple’s own can play those files.

It’s just serving a few TB of anime right now, and seems to be working OK.

I have more to do.  Like, I should figure out some stuff to run that isn’t just a media server.  But, for now, I have a valid answer to “describe your home lab for me.”