What’s everyone working on?, Summer 2024 edition 🏖️☀️

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I saw the June 2024 post and thought, after not posting in the last year (still reading occasionally), I hope it’s okay to make this new “summer edition” post.

For myself, the last year allot changed within my home lab, and now I’m working on a final important part after migrating from my older, big boy 19" servers to my 5 NUC’s Proxmox cluster, and that is backups.

I backup to a NAS, but I also like to have external versions that are not connected to the home lab in any way.

I already used Acronis on my main PC and decided to increase the space and let my PC handle these backups, so I don’t have to get another (server) license.
The backups were already on a share, so Acronis can access them easily and send them to the cloud.

These backups are just the VM and LXC backups, btw.
I do not backup the Proxmox hosts themselves, as I rarely change settings on them, and what I do need to configure is documented in my Netbox and almost all host-specific.
So reinstalling is faster than recovering a backup from my NAS in my situation.

I also tested this by trying to recover a full node from nothing by reinstalling PVE and pulling the backups from Acronis. And it worked better than expected; the only downside was that getting the two bigger backups (one 80 GB+) will take some time; all other backups are less than 5GB and recover pretty quickly.

I have to monitor this for a bit, so I’m sure it’s usable in a disaster situation, but for now, it looks great.
For the rest, I like to try new software within my lab and will probably also spend some time on that.

My current home lab rack

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Thank you for sharing your updates and the photo of your current home lab setup.

Your transition to a Proxmox cluster on NUCs sounds impressive, and it’s great to hear about your backup strategy using Acronis. Having external backups is a smart move to ensure data safety. Testing your recovery process is crucial, and it’s encouraging that your full node recovery went smoothly, even with larger backups.

Keep us updated on how it performs in disaster situations. Enjoy experimenting with new software in your lab! Your rack looks neat and well-organized. I would love to feature it on linuxblog.io once you have 2 or 3 more photos.

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Proxmox cluster on NUCs - great idea! And, like @hydn , I think your rack looks great!

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I’m still planing on adding a true firewall solution to my home network. I’m thinking of:

  1. Sophos (free)
  2. OPNsense (Free)
  3. pfSense (CE/Free)
  4. any suggestions?

Will install on a rack mount device I can find online < $200.00

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Unifi… :laughing:

It’s a great network solution, and the firewall is fine for what I need it for.
(Nothing crazy, I know it has its function limits)

And I like to have the firewall in a separate box.

If I now had to use something else, I would probably go with OPNsense.