Putting together my homelab

Table of contents

1. Flight Tracker
2. Keyboard, Video, and Mouse Switch (KVM)
3. Network Attached Storage (NAS)
   1. General Storage
   2. Backups and Media
4. Raspberry Pi Clusters
   1. Original
   2. Upgraded
   3. Current
5. Rack
   1. Modular 10" Server Rack
   2. M970Q 10" Rack Mount
   3. Raspberry Pi 10" Rack Mount

Flight Tracker

As I live fairly close to Cardiff International Airport and notice many aircraft flying over my house I have set up a flight tracker find out some more information about the planes and contribute the flight tracking information to FlightAware for others to benefit from the information too.

Keyboard, Video, and Mouse Switch (KVM)

I use a Raspberry Pi 4 under my desk as a KVM switch using PiKVM alongside an Ezcoo EZ-SW41HA-KVMU3L to access 4 machines over my network.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

General Storage

I purchased the Odroid XU4 and CloudShell enclosure to use as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server to replace an old outdated and failing 1TB Western Digital MyBook World edition NAS.

It also used to be used to run a handful of Docker containers, however, since many containers have dropped 32bit ARM support I have moved them to their own cluster.

Backups and Media

• 2TB 2.5" Western Digital Blue £30.00
• 32GB Corsair Vengeance 3000MHz £37.99
• Generic PCIe SATA 3.0 Expansion Card £7.50
• MSI H310M PRO-M2 PLUS for £43.39
• Stone Small Factor case with 250W PSU for £14.12

Raspberry Pi Clusters

Original

This was my original Raspberry Pi cluster, It was originally 4 layers however I managed to find a case that fit perfectly to add an additional layer. If you look hard enough, you will see that the fan of the bottom layer is in a slightly different place and the standoffs are slightly shorter.

The cluster was later repurposed to learn Ansible when the Raspberry Pi 2s became a little too slow to run Docker.

Upgraded

I got this case from eBay, it was not in the best shape, very dusty and scratched, it cost me £68.55 but it did contain 3 Raspberry Pi 3s (including one with broken Wifi and Bluetooth) and a few Micro USB Chargers Ethernet cables. The case also came with a switch that fits at the bottom perfectly.

I cleaned it up with some isopropyl alcohol and re-assembled it with some new screws as some of them were quite rusted.

I assembled this cluster to learn all about Containerization using Docker Swarm mode and eventually, Kubernetes using MicroK8s, however the Raspberry Pi 3s are a little too slow to fully run a K8s cluster with more than a handful of containers.

Current

My Raspberry Pi Zero cluster was assembled using a 8086 Cluster Hat that is quite cool due to it using USB gadget mode of the Raspberry Pi Zero to boot up the Raspberry Pis over USB therefore they do not require their own MicroSD cards and can share the storage of the controller Pi... However after some testing, adding their own SD cards speeds up disk reads and writes considerably under load.

Rack

Modular 10" Server Rack

M970Q 10" Rack Mount

Raspberry Pi 10" Rack Mount