2024 - The year that wasn't a year for blog posts

Man, I'm slack. Last post February?

I haven't been that slack. 

In my last post, I'd put the radio in the Ranger and it was all good. Then things got busy for a while. I took the little fella camping. My first time taking myself camping as an adult. Somehow one night in a campground that is no longer there cost me more than a night in a posh city hotel. 

Anyway, a lot of other things were achieved this year. Few had much to do with radios. 

- In December I'd ordered our verandah from Stratco. After a few months of messing around, I managed to find a building surveyor to arrange a building permit (a local requirement unfortunately) and inspections - the cheapest of which cost as much as the verandah itself. 

We managed to get the verandah built around April/May. And by that, I mean, we put up the structure and left the grass to die under it. 

Over the next few months, I managed to build in the west wall, which isn't structurally tied to the verandah at all (intentional as it was never designed for it). I also constructed the east "wall" which is predominantly open, with a clothes line on the inside (don't laugh, it's great when it rains). 

Somewhere around this, I managed to travel up to Maree. We'd planned on attempting the Birdsville Track, but the weather wasn't in our favour and our timing wasn't ideal with a festival being on in Birdsville at the time we'd planned on driving across. We'd tossed up whether it was worth it. By the Saturday afternoon we were glad we hadn't. The track was full of bogged festival goers trying to get home (and they were bogged out there for days). We did see the bottom of Lake Eyre and put some time in around the Flinders Rangers. 

We went to Bathurst as well and I took another week off after it. I'm still trying to catch up with those 2 weeks off.

- In server land, a lot changed. Broadcom purchased VMware, which has caused a lot of upset in my world given their pricing will skyrocket over the coming years. I migrated out to Proxmox to start to get a feel for it (I've since had to use it for work). 

I moved the NVR to Frigate. It's taken quite some time to get that behaving how I wanted. It's a lot more stable now that I've finally got it recording to a local disk rather than NFS mounts to the NAS sitting next to it. It's running on a dedicated mini PC. It has a Google Coral TPU connected and of all things, a fan that sits on top of the solid topped case forcing air over it - something that has significantly improved its reliability. The CPU cooling inside is passive, so keeping the case cool helps. 

- My NAS is technically back to being virtualised - though it's now fully SSD backed. I've rejigged my primary server (DL380 Gen10) to hold 3 disk boxes - totaling 24 2.5" disks at the front, and 2 at the rear (these are the boot array). There are a few arrays - one for virtual machines, 2 for media and 1 for the boot array. The VM array also has a few extra "virtual" disks for things that are a little transient. 

I had been using a DL380 Gen9 cut down to a single CPU connected to a 3RU chassis that held all of the 3.5" hard disks. The DL380 itself was pulling around 90w, and the disk shelf was probably similar when it was full. The DL380 Gen10 has probably gone up 40w - though that's under a fair bit of load at the moment while I push data around and sort out backups.
Either way, the rack is currently drawing 750w, and I've got the tape library running a long backup job. Earlier it was hovering around 700w. Down from being over 800w. 

I've also started containerising some of my VMs into Docker. So far I've managed to merge around 4 VMs into containers. That little change has recovered around 32GB RAM, and probably over 100GB of storage. The VM that runs the containers barely notices that they're there.

I've changed my IPAM from GestioIP to phpIPAM. It's well recommended for home labs, and it spun up in Docker easily enough. A bit of massaging of the export from GestioIP and I was able to import most of that data. An IPAM by the way is really about managing IP addresses and network related stuff. My network is a little "complex" compared to what the average person has at home, so it needs a bit of management. It's "normal" on my network for around 100 clients to be connected.

The easiest wins were my two PiHole servers - I have 3 in total; a redundant setup across two boxes (the second lives on the NVR server which is located elsewhere on a different UPS). The third is one dedicated to the kids network. It has a few additional things that are blocked.  Very, very easy wins.
I was able to migrate all of my media management things into Docker as well; some of this took a while as I worked around data transfers I was doing at the same time, as well as getting the required paths working properly in Docker. 

The other win was my "Media Proxy" - basically Nginx running as a reverse proxy on my internal network that converts all of the various services running on random port numbers into rational URLs (for example a service might be http://192.168.0.1:8081 but the reverse proxy will take a request to http://myservice.home.x and send it to where it needs to go). I had a dedicated FreeBSD VM running to do this, but now it's just a simple little container. I copied in my existing configuration file and only had to remove a couple of lines to get it working again. 

It's taken me most of a weekend to get this far. Each VM that's gone is one less server that needs to be updated and maintained (even though I did automate a lot of it). They also take up resources. Those resources burn power.  While I don't mind using power while the sun shines, I'm eager to streamline things and get our overnight power consumption down. We're often sitting around 1500w constantly overnight.

It's been a fairly busy year. I'd hoped this year to go camping more with my little fella. It just hasn't been a thing. I've been away enough already, and I've lacked the time and money to do more. One day, maybe. 

To dos: The south "wall" on the verandah needs to happen to finish that part off. After that, it's save for blinds and decking. These might be a year or two away.