Well, this is something I never wanted to talk about.
My father has terminal cancer, and the home I’ve known for a very long time will be put on the market after he is gone, however long that takes, so I am starting to get my homelab reduced in size as far as I can within reason without taking the entire rack apart.
So far, I’ve moved the domains I had my own authoritative DNS servers for back to Cloudflare and decommissioned those two VMs along with a couple of other ones: a TacticalRMM instance and the XLX reflector I’d set up. I also decommissioned the NUC and its VMs, but I am putting it back into service as the sole hypervisor at home. I’d added a 2nd NIC to mine, so I can keep a “storage network” separate for specific VMs. I opted to use Proxmox this time on the NUC, and already have a DC (running Server 2022 Eval for the time being), a Pi-Hole, and placeholder VMs for Plex and my downloader.
The ultimate plan is to have my homelab down to a significantly smaller switch, likely the Cisco Business CBS250-8PP-E-2G, the NUC, the Synology, the current OPNsense firewall, the Cisco Business CBW150AX AP I picked up recently, and naturally the UPS under my desk should have enough power to keep everything powered until safe shutdown. I’ve got enough room on the PDU I have for my gaming rig and Mac and associated stuff for sure, and I can probably fit the NUC and Synology in there too, but probably not the networking gear. I do have a second PDU and UPS for the current networking gear which in the long run might be the better way to go for the firewall, switch, my Echo Dot and whatever I’m going to end up with for an ISP device. That UPS is another desktop model, so I could tuck that in a corner too. We’ll see though… I have to get this room cleared out a lot first, but at least getting the rack servers decommissioned soon will help.
That brings up another question, though. I currently have two servers hosted at Coloblox and one of them hosts this and my other WordPress blogs. I can easily move those back to DreamHost, so that’s not a huge problem. The larger problem is that there’s a domain controller that holds all the FSMO roles, my WireGuard VPN’s endpoint, and a Pi-Hole that serves the VPN. As long as I’m staying around Metro Atlanta, I’ll keep those up there, but if I decide to move away, especially if it’s to the opposite coast or another country, I’ll need to decide what to do about those servers. I mean, I might just decide on keeping them if I can figure out where to move them, or I’ll just deal without as generally speaking I’m either at work or at home currently.
I’ll write more at some point I’m sure, but for now… the next time I write this blog and my others will be back on DreamHost.