Gaelin blog

A friend and I have a homelab setup between our houses. We have been slowly amassing assorted old and new servers to add to this lab so that we have a fun playground and can host all the game servers and websites we want.

• 2x Netgate SG-3100 (pfsense)
• 1x Netgate SG-1100 (pfsense)
• 1x HPE DL360 G6
• 6x Lenovo DL350
• 1x Raspberry pi 5
• 2x Raspberry pi 4
• 5x Raspberry pi 3B
• 1x HPE G5(?)
• 2x Old desktop
• 1x 42U Rack
• 2x Netgear S3300-28X stacking switches
• Custom NAS build
  • JONSBO N3 case with 8 bays
  • Intel i7-12700K, 12 (8P + 4E) core 20 thread @ 3.6GHz
  • 32GB DDR5 @ 6000MHz
  • 1x 16TB Seagate IronWolf
  • 3x 8TB Seagate IronWolf
• Assorted switches

Totaling to ~400gb ram, ~72 cores @ 1.6-3.5Ghz, and ~70tb raw disk capacity

Good question! Mostly just messing around, having fun, and learning!

I connected all 3 pfsenses via ipsec tunnels so that the infrastructure at each location is accessible from the other 2.

I run my website (this one) as well as a few other sites from one of the old desktops. I also run a minecraft server across both of the old desktops.

My friend is using 2 of the PIs to run his website.

We currently have 3 Lenovos in a XCP-ng cluster and the other 3 in a Proxmox cluster. We have the G6 setup as a NAS backing the VMs that we have running on the cluster.¹⁾

We have three of the PIs setup as pi holes for DNS based ad blocking. Currently we are blocking ~7.5m domains.

We have a Factorio server running on the G5 and on one of the desktops.

We have 2 Netgear S3300-28X switches so that we can use link aggregation to get a redundant, high throughput storage network connection.

Each location is assigned a 10.x.0.0/16. Subnet ip ranges are standardized to:

• 10.x.0.0/24 : DMZ
• 10.x.1.0/24 : Admin
• 10.x.2.0/24 : LAN
• 10.x.3.0/24 : Other

This way the ipsec tunnel only has to allow access to 10.X.0.0/23 externally, and can safely block incoming to anything else. Anything that does not have a 10.x address is only for local access/internet access and will not be able to traverse the ipsec tunnel.

Here is a netmap! I removed some information from it but it should give a decent idea of how I have things setup

• 2016: I got my first desktop. Since then I have been running various websites and game servers in my free time.

• 2019: I got a second desktop to use as a dedicated server. I also added a pihole which functions as a wifi access point for my laptop.

• 2020: I got a small Netgate firewall running pfsense.

• 2021: I got an old HPE server from my school which was selling a bunch of old hardware.

• 2022, May: I received a 42U rack. A friend and I decided to combine our home labs to this rack and colo out of their basement.

• 2023, December: I bought 6x Lenovo RD350 and a HPE DL360 G6 which where being decommissioned from my school's datacenter.

• 2024, January: I got 2x Netgear S3300-28X so that we would have good stable networking and so I could play around with stacking

• 2025, January: I built a new NAS with 40TB raw capacity