13. December 2021

irgNET – LAB 5.0 U1

By H. Cemre Günay

Welcome to Update 1 of the major Update 5. In this episode, we now separate Site A from Site B completely with fire sections. Nevertheless, both data centers are connected via Fritz PowerLine adapters over the internal power grid. An honest opinion on my part: PowerLine adapters are not suitable for data center throughputs, since I can’t get more than 25 Mbit/s – however – I can’t set it up any other way at the moment. In the future, a fiber optic cable will be laid between the fire compartments so that I can benefit from any future bandwidths.

In addition, some things have changed on the application level. Because with this update the idea with my own blog started, which is based on WordPress.

Thanks again to my mentor Marc Huppert https://vcdx181.com/ and special Thanks to
Manuel Billmaier https://mb-labs.de/ my Brother in arms for his technical Support especially with the integration of NGINX Proxy Manager.

Since I only have a fixed IP address booked, I could not make my NextCloud and my blog publicly accessible. There were two options available – either I book another fixed IP address with my internet provider or I build a reverse proxy which is the main station for both services and internally forwards the corresponding information to the right destination. So I decided to use the NGINX Proxy Manager, which is easy to use and self-explanatory.

I will write a How-To in the future under Advanced Tutorials and show you how to install the Proxy Manager.

Until recently I used an Excel sheet as IP address management, probably like many of you. However, the more VMs, hardware, network components you get, the more complex the overview becomes. I looked on the Internet for a free or open source variant to Infoblox (which is too expensive for a one man show) and became aware of Netbox, which already has a certain level of awareness.

With Netbox you not only have an IP address management but you can map your entire data center including visual representation. I will also write a How-To Tutorial in the future, where I explain how to set up the whole thing.

Except for the currently modest network connection, the Home Lab has once again evolved a bit and looks like this:

Hardware List

Ubiquiti Networks UAP-AC-PRO: https://amzn.to/31KYa01
FRITZ!Repeater 3000: https://amzn.to/3jfI0R0
HPE 1820-24G (Follow-up product): https://amzn.to/3CB1HeO
HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 (Follow-up product): https://amzn.to/2UsaWwI
FRITZ!Box 6660 (Follow-up product): https://amzn.to/3yUYAfF
Western Digital Black 2TB: https://amzn.to/2ZuUCOb
AVM FRITZ!Powerline 1220E Set https://amzn.to/3m1A5bZ

That’s it from this update in my home lab. If you have any questions, please use the comment section. 🙂