{"id":511,"date":"2024-06-29T12:33:35","date_gmt":"2024-06-29T11:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/10.1.7.2:9701\/?p=511"},"modified":"2025-06-18T02:51:18","modified_gmt":"2025-06-18T01:51:18","slug":"at-a-decent-ground-with-my-home-lab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidsula.com\/index.php\/511\/at-a-decent-ground-with-my-home-lab\/","title":{"rendered":"At a decent ground with my home-lab."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In recent time, I went through the process of completely revamping my home-lab from scratch. I ditched the old Dell PowerEdge R720xd and settled for an R720 just because I didn\u2019t need all those 2.5 inch drive slots that the R720xd had to offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Dell PowerEdge R720<\/sup><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I also, with the help of my father, managed to pull an ethernet cable across the house – from my router to my server. This way I now get a nice speed of 900mbps<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now here is where the fun<\/span> part comes in.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

IT Mode Crossflashing<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I started off with having to flash my new perc card to IT mode. Already getting thrown into the deep end. This process took me several tries because in the first two attempts I ignored the instruction to ‘remove the raid battery’ from the perc card in the tutorial<\/a> I was following.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even after following the tutorial correctly, it took me multiple tries before it finally decided to work. I never changed my process in these attempts, it just worked eventually so I refuse to touch it any further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This took me about two days. After this, I set up Proxmox booting off a 3TB HDD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Setting up remote access<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Since I’d want to spend time here and there whilst I’m away at school working on my home-lab projects, I started off my setting up my pfSense VM. This way all VMs I’d make from there on could be put on my pfSense network, and I could set up an OpenVPN server on pfSense to remotely access my Proxmox from anywhere when I feel the need to carry on with my projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One big long-lasting issue I came across was that my laptop and phone would randomly disconnect from my OpenVPN server. I started off convinced that the school Wi-Fi had somehow managed to block me from using OpenVPN to remote into my home network and access my home-lab, but it turned out to be a setting in the configuration. Apparently there are two separate settings for concurrent connections to the VPN server. One is how many concurrent connections to allow, and another is how many concurrent connections to allow from the same user. Unfortunately I had only configured concurrent connections overall, and not those from the same user, so whenever I’d turn on my laptop in school my VPN would go ham because there were two concurrent connections from the same user.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That part took me about a week to figure out because I was so convinced that it was the school Wi-Fi, having only experienced the issue whilst I was in school because that’s where I use my laptop. Before finding the actual fix, I even changed my subnet from 10.1.1.0\/24 to 10.1.7.0\/24 thinking that conflicting subnets with the school’s may be an issue (it was a stupid blog post I read online and I decided to give it a try). At the end of the day, I made the change in the configuration and have not had issues since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My pfSense now runs stable on 2 CPUs, with 4GB of RAM and a 32GB boot disk size.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MySQL<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I decided that this time, instead of having a MySQL host for each app I host, I will have one database host to manage all of my databases on. What I mean by this is that, before I made this restart in my home-lab, I used to have docker containers from stacks like ‘wordpress-wordpress’, accompanied with ‘wordpress-db’, and I’d also have a separate database host for my pterodactyl panel. This time I decided to make a separate Proxmox VM dedicated to MySQL. This way I can have all my databases in one spot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This came with huge advantages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n