Welcome back! Today we’re going to be starting a series about my homelab adventures and exploring some of the lessons learned, thoughts behind it, and how I’ve put these technologies into practice to make my life easier and more secure. We’ll start with the basics: What’s a homelab and why did I start making one?
Category: Overly Complicated Projects
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State of the Network: 2023
Welcome to AASullivan.com! I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, so here it is: The State of My Network. I’ve been planning to do an overview of my entire set up for some time now and I’ve finally kept everything in a consistent state now for a few months after many years of tinkering. A little background…
My home network (also known as my “home lab”) has been a long term project of mine to both try out new technologies and keep my skills sharp in a real server environment. It started in 2014 with a single server in my apartment running ESXI 3.5 on a system with a 6 core AMD CPU and 16GB of RAM. It was a blast to try new things (DNS server, file server, Plex, etc) and I’ve learned a lot since those times. My current Home Lab is considerably bigger now and is larger now than many small company systems; My poor power bill will never be the same. Let’s take a look at some of the set up!
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VMWare Kubernetes Cluster Build Notes
I built a Kubernetes cluster tonight to try and learn a bit about this technology, here are my notes about building it!
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Tekkit2 Minecraft Build notes on Ubuntu 22.04LTS
Assuming a fresh install of Ubuntu 22.04LTS, accepting default options and no extra packages except OpenSSH server to login.
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Notes from installing Nextcloud on Ubuntu 22.04LTS
Today I set up another Nextcloud server after taking the former one offline due to the size of backups for it getting a little out of hand. This also allows me to run the latest current version of Ubuntu Server (22.04LTS).
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Building a non-logging, encrypted DNS server
Welcome back! Today I’m working on a project to secure my web surfing to be an anonymous as possible using a combination of a software package called “Pi-Hole” and a VPN provider.
So, let’s start at the basics: VPN and DNS
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Battery backups: maintaining access when there’s no power
A little background: Some years back I learned a very hard lesson about losing power on a RAID array that didn’t have an onboard battery backup. The result was ~7TB of data gone, about 1.5TB completely irreplaceable including old school work and photos. This was a hard pill to swallow and helped me get better about redundant backups and another thing that was especially important: UPS backups, or Uninterruptible Power Supplies.
A UPS is a device which provides power for a short time during a home or business power failure by providing an AC output to whatever is plugged into it. I have several of these scattered throughout my home, including for my desktop and a couple lights around the house which act as emergency lighting using older, smaller UPS devices. My servers are always running UPS backups, but on a big larger scale.
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Raspberry Pi offline Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a vast archive of knowledge and information we tend to forget is there. An encyclopedia of knowledge brought by users and edited by a community, it has a high accuracy rate and information on just about any subject you could want. You can also download an entire archive of it at around 90GB at the time of this writing!
I’ve had the idea for a while now about making an offline version to run locally for myself or friends, maybe something just to browse during a flight or roadtrip. Or, as my prepping thoughts say, maybe something for when the power’s out and easy to access! Enter the Raspberry Pi, a low cost and low power computer to run this using a suite of tools you can run off a battery pack and access from one’s phone/tablet/computer. Well, this is easier than you might think! I’ll be going over the ideas and thought processes of this at a high level as the project took some time. I can provide more details if you’d like by reaching out to me at if you’d like.
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unRAID: capacity and ease of use over performance
I’ve been looking over various NAS (Network-Attached-Storage) operating systems for some time now. Naturally, there’s two big players in the game that everyone seems to go to: FreeNAS and unRAID. Both boast a considerable user base, community add on support and a ton of customization but one big difference at a quick glance: FreeNAS, as the name implies, is free while unRAID is a pay for licensed OS. But a quick glance only shows so much.
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Automated Youtube Downloads Into Plex (Windows)
Welcome to another Overly Complicate Project! This time, it started with some advice from our friends at r/DataHoarder and a fun tool called “youtube-dl”. This has taken a bit of tinkering and some custom code, but I now have an all-in-one solution that downloads Youtube videos from a playlist/channel, confirms progress to save bandwidth on future downloads, and stores them into a Plex library for local viewing. Let’s begin.
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