I realized that this professional blog has begun to veer into personal stuff. I don’t really want this. Sure, we have tragedies in our lives. But if we are going to stay above the mire, we have to keep walking. So I’m going to discuss some of my new initiatives that are planned for my home lab.
Since 201x, I’ve used a small Ubuntu server on an Optiplex machine saved from the dump. Salvaging 3 of them, I slapped all the RAM available into one, for a hefty grand total of 8 GB. The one new part is a 1 TB SSD, purchased on points at Best Buy. It runs on an old i5 processor, which still amazingly features 4 cores. Thank god for upgrade cycles.
The end goal for this machine: making something like AWS’s EC2 or EKS at home. Specifically an interface/API that I can directly use to spin up stuff on a whim. This will probably consist of a Plex server running on Rancher that my Roku can hook itself up to when I want to view my own home videos or things that I ripped off an old DVD when it’s unavailable to stream.
Because this home lab will rely on persistent storage, some parts of it will be long-lasting. I don’t think movies kept in DropBox or S3 will be good, so those can live on my NAS backup drive. The actual container or VM image can be deployed via Terraform or Vagrant, which I’ll eventually house in a public repo.
My question past that is whether I can get TF to run properly on some janky freeware like VirtualBox or, god forbid, an actual VMWare distro. Did anybody else feel that cold shiver pass through the walls? In a perfect world, this home lab will be completely open-source. But that world does not exist … yet.
This project may be more intensive than planned, but I think doing it will be a fun way to share my goals with the world at large. Let me know if you have any ideas in the comments below!