“Also here’s to not making it a full year between blog posts.”

It’s actually been over 2 years at this point since a real blog post. Almost 2 if you include the non-post I made before Christmas where I lied about making a tutorial on Kolab. I totaled my car, gained some weight, drank beer, played DOOM, bought a bunch of used server gear, lost some weight, switched to Hugo, and now I’m here. But at least my homelab is in good shape now. I’m sick and cooling on some Robotussin right now so I’m just gonna kinda slam the keys for a while until I’m done.

I’ve got a ton of stuff I want to make writeups on, but I need to do my best to not look like I’m just copying Craft Computing. Jeff does all the stuff I want to do but he does them sooner and better because he’s not as broke and dumb as I am. Wendell and him inspired me to finally delve in to vGPU and I wound up picking up a 5800X for my desktop so I could handle running 2 gaming rigs in my machine, mostly so I could play Call of Duty while running Linux and not having to reboot. Got everything working, but the 1070 Ti was better served in our living room VR rig so it’s there now and I gave up on playing Call of Duty because it’s a bad game that no one should play. But then I turned it in to a useful project when I made a virtual gaming PC for my daughter so she could play Minecraft and other cooler games without destroying my bank account because a used 1650 covered in cigarette burns and made out of cardboard is the same as the downpayment for a house right now.

I also put together 2 retro PCs that I’m pretty happy with. Neither of them are set up right now because I don’t really have the room to keep them hooked up all the time and I’m way too lazy to switch over to them as often as I’d like to, but they’re around and they exist. One’s a 98-ish (honestly more of a 2000/XP) machine and the other is an almost 1:1 recreation of my first “high budget” gaming PC I put together when I first went to college 11 years ago that I run Windows XP on (it was still pretty popular in 2010 so it’s valid and not shoehorned fight me about it).

I also took advantage of my free time and started getting more comfortable with soldering, which is cool I guess. For the first time in my entire life, I have a Dreamcast with a working CMOS battery. Chris and I are working on getting some 3D printed parts and open source hardware together for use with various guitars that go unloved by the CH community because they’re trash in their stock configuration for use with Clone Hero due to either stupid connection requirements or ass latency. No sense gatekeeping knowledge or requiring people to specifically go to you for a pre-made mod so I guess we’re going to lend some designs to the open hardware collection for the cringe losers who press buttons to bleep bloop (not to be confused with stepmania or osu players, they’re more well adjusted).

I decided to react to Update 0, so like and subscribe and absolutely destroy that notification bell so that more of my epic reaction content shows up right in your feed:

“I was planning on using ESXi, but XCP-ng offers me the option to run the latest version on nearly any piece of kit I throw at it”

XCP-ng is still hyper based and does offer me that in my gaming rig but I’ve fallen for the VMware meme for everything else and I can’t get up because It Just Werks.

“I try to run the PE1900 as little as possible”

I forgot I even owned a PowerEdge 1900. I never got around to setting it up because it didn’t come with an iDRAC card and also sucked.

“I’m sure the girl will appreciate not having a line hanging out of a ceiling tile to get the AP over to the router anymore.”

Nope, still hanging there. It’s been more than 3 years since I moved in and that shit is in the exact same spot but no one goes in the basement for fun because it got jacked in multiple floods. We just do laundry and then go back upstairs.

“UPS of some sort […] Proper PDU”

I can check those off the list of things I wanted to do 3 years ago at least.

“Either an R510 or a DL180se […] DL380e”

Ironically I wound up getting the DL380e instead of an R510 or a DL180se and got DL3{6,8}p units for my virt hosts which run 24/7 and consume more power than the R310 did. Whoops.

“I need to properly implement VLANs”

Yeah I did that too, and 192.168.0.0 is a /23 not a /22 now, but I still haven’t moved all my stuff on to the appropriate VLANs and converted 0.0 and 1.0 to /24s. Eventually maybe.

“10Gbit networking for at least my hosts”

I started it. Does that count?

“VM Upgrade Plans:”

I didn’t do any of these, except getting a reverse proxy set up. I dunno why I ever stalled on doing that. At least my upload is reasonable enough to justify backing some of my stuff up to my S3 buckets now.

“Writing my own IPAM/DCIM service”

what the hell am i talking about i am never going to do this

“networked audio system using some Raspberry Pis and HiFiBerry hats”

logitech media server idiot.

“I just wrote all that for an audience of zero”

haha same

I rediscovered Yotam Perel recently. I call bottom bunk.

Stuff of interest someone might like reading that I’m thinking about doing a write-up on:

  • My experiences with setting up a Ryzen, rack-mounted remote gaming PC (not calling it a cloud gaming PC because that’ll taint my SEO with the better Craft Computing videos)
  • My journey with ESXi, vCenter, clustering, vSAN, and vMotion
  • The mistake of falling for the Ubiquiti meme
  • A start to finish guide on setting up a working Pajbot instance
  • Keeping plastic guitars viable long after Activision abandoned us
  • The retro machines I built

Hopefully the existential dread stops soon so I can actually be productive. Ok bye.