GoKawiilI started this “blog-series” to force myself to write more about my set up, and my continuous iterations. But it didn’t happen… until today! This post has been a long time coming, and I have kept the ideas in my head and notes.
I will walk through everything I did, in order:
Previous setup
Two years ago, I revamped my homelab. I had just bought a new machine to use as my main home server, coming from a 9U server rack with a bunch of machines tangled together. Back then I finally sat down to figure out how I want things. And it has worked great… until it hasn’t.
The new machine back then, a Zimaboard, was set up with NixOS, which seems excellent and worked perfectly until I wanted to do a basic cronjob for backups. I never figured out how to do that, so I basically did my backups manually whenever I had the time. I use Restic, which is awesome.
Network situation
We have a 750/750 Mbps fiber-connection with Bergen Fiber (Altibox), which is more than enough for our needs. It’s a very reliable connection, never slow, absolutely no complaints about the connection.
Earlier this year we moved to a house, where we own the whole thing, it’s amazing! But the network situation wasn’t great. Not a single Ethernet port in the whole house, except where the fiber and modem were located. And guess where that’s located!? Beside the door to the balcony, where the previous owner used to have their TV (we have made a separate TV room). One thing to note, there was a bunch of phone lines throughout the house, and we’ll get to those later.
My previous setup, underneath the cat's feeding station.
As you can see, not an ideal placement, especially after we found out that it was the perfect location for the cat to have his food, away from the dog.
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