Autor: adminms
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Enterprise Security on a Homelab Budget: My FortiGate 90G Gamble and the 10GbE Necessity
Building an advanced homelab often feels like a constant collision between engineering dreams and the brutal reality of enterprise hardware pricing. For the longest time, running a fully licensed, modern Unified Threat Management (UTM) firewall at home felt financially impossible. The hardware is expensive, but the annual subscription renewals are what truly break the bank.…
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The Ultimate Homelab Power Outage Orchestrator: Complete Automation with NUT, PowerShell, and vSphere
Every homelabber fears the sudden click of a UPS kicking into battery mode. When you run a complex infrastructure, a hard power cut can corrupt a storage array, ruin backups, or cause split-brain scenarios in high-availability clusters. The goal of this project is to achieve absolute peace of mind: a fully automated, intelligent orchestration system…
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Cable Chaos: IT Admin vs. Aquarist
Let’s settle a debate based on these photos: who is worse to live with – an aquarist tinkering with a fish tank every weekend, or an IT admin upgrading a server rack on weekdays? Why choose one nightmare when you can have both in one person? Welcome to my girlfriend’s nightmare.
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Silencing the Beast: MikroTik CRS518-16XS-2XQ-RM Noctua Fan Mod
Every homelab environment eventually reaches a bottleneck where standard networking gear just isn’t enough anymore. For me, that moment came with the expansion of my VMware cluster with vSAN. To ensure seamless operation and eliminate storage latency, I needed serious bandwidth. Enter the MikroTik CRS518-16XS-2XQ-RM. I hesitated for a long time before buying it. The…
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Frankenstein’s UPS: Giving a CyberPower 1000VA an 80Ah Upgrade
Who said you can’t fit a massive 80Ah battery into a tiny desktop UPS? Okay, well, technically it doesn’t fit inside, but who cares about minor details like „physical dimensions” or „manufacturer specifications”? Today, I decided to see what happens when you introduce a humble CyberPower Value Pro 1000VA to an absolute unit of a…
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Defusing the Analog Bomb: A Hospital’s Legacy Phone System
Every network administrator has that one specific nightmare. You open a cabinet expecting a standard patch panel, and instead, you are greeted by an analog telephony distribution frame that looks like it remembers the early Brezhnev era. This is exactly what we are dealing with at a client’s site—a functioning hospital, no less. There is…
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The All-Seeing Eye: Mastering Zabbix in the Modern Homelab
Every homelab eventually reaches a critical mass. You move from running a few isolated virtual machines to managing a complex web of hypervisors, network hardware, and storage arrays. At that point, guessing what is happening under the hood is no longer an option. You need complete, centralized visibility. In my environment, that role is fulfilled…
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Beating the Heat: A DIY 180mm Fan Mod for My Server Rack
One of the absolute biggest drawbacks of having a server rack in your house is the notorious combination of constant overheating and jet-engine noise levels. Today, I decided to tackle both of these problems in one fell swoop. Standard rack fans just weren’t cutting it, so I brought out the heavy artillery: I mounted two…
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Breaking the 10GbE Barrier: Upgrading from a 4-Bay Bottleneck to the QNAP TS-855eU ZFS Powerhouse
For the last few years, my storage architecture has heavily relied on an Asustor LOCKERSTOR 2 Gen2 (AS6702T). It is a fantastic machine, but its role in my environment has been strictly limited to serving as a dedicated backup repository. As my VMware cluster expanded and my 10GbE/25GbE network fabric matured, I needed something much…
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Pushing 10GbE to the Limit: Upgrading to a Rackmount NAS
The time has finally come to upgrade my well-worn homelab storage. I am officially retiring my old, trusty tower NAS and moving up to a proper rack-mounted solution. I am swapping out the Asustor AS6702T for a sleek, short-depth 1U workhorse: the 4-bay QNAP TS-435XeU-4G. Moving to a 4-bay chassis meant I had to expand…
Recent Posts
- [HW Upgrade] FortiGate 80E -> 70G
- The Overkill Zone: Building a 100Gbps+ vSAN ESA Micro-Data Center
- Enterprise-Grade Email in a HomeLab: Integrating Exchange, Proxmox Mail Gateway, and FortiGate Introduction
- Delicate Surgery on an Ancient Tape Library
- Mission Accomplished: The Weekend Migration is Complete!
