The last month or so I’ve been replacing my Ubiquity Unifi switches. It’s part of a complete network rebuild — more posts will follow…

Four years ago; when I first got into the Unifi system, I loved the single pane of glass admin interface. But now I feel that the interface is too glossed over, prioritizing looks over function. The new Unifi controller UI is just terrible…

I like networking, it’s one of my hobbies. I want VLANs to be named VLANs, not network isolation.

A few days ago; sitting outside — drinking coffee and minding my own business, I received an email from my UPS:

Utility power not available.

2021/06/01 18:38:27

My homelab had lost both power sources 😮 This whole area had a power outage — a good opportunity to do a UPS and power down test 😛

I moved my main hypervisor, Alpha, into a new server case; a compact Inter-Tech with 8 hot-swappable bays in the front.

I also moved the four SSDs over from the failed ZFS SSD pool project, and this time it worked! 😃

One (potential) downside to running public services on your homelab, is that you expose your IP address. That may, or may not, be a problem — but here are ways around it. The simplest way is to put Cloudflare in front, but this will only handle web traffic, and is a bit of a black box.

Another, more hands-on, approach is to use a VPS (or LXC container); WireGuard and iptables. We will create a secure tunnel between the VPS/container and the homelab HAProxy instance, and forward traffic using iptables.

This post was suppose to be a “look I made an SSD ZFS pool”, but will instead be the first post in a trouble-shooting series. Trying to get my SSDs to behave.

But — I am getting ahead of myself… Let’s start at the beginning.