Speaking of MikroTik, MikroTik makes great enterprise network equipment, including access points, routers, and switches. Their unmatched affordability makes them an excellent choice for home labs. These are four products that I think stand out in their respective category: MikroTik RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD-IN Router with 10x 1GBe Ports, 1x 10GBe SFP+ Port, Quad Core ARM CPU, 1GB RAM, RouterOS, PoE output, WiFi 4 / 5 (also available without WiFi) and Support for Rack Mounting MikroTik CSS326-24G-2S+RM Switch with 24x 1GBe Ports, 2x 10GBe SFP+ Ports, SwOS and Support for Rack Mounting MikroTik CRS305-1G-4S+IN Switch with 4x 10GBe SFP+ Ports, 1x GBe Port for Management Access, Dual DC Jacks for Power Redundancy in a Compact Metal Case MikroTik cAP ac Access Point with Support for WiFi 4 / 5 with a Minimalist Design These products have served me very well and allow for advanced networking at a low cost.

This article will be more networking-oriented. We’ll enable an OpenVPN server on MikroTik RouterOS, and we’ll do so on the router with the shortest of names, the MikroTik RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD-IN. It should work on other MikroTik routers as well. We’ll be using RouterOS console in this article, but you should be able to do this with Webfig or Winbox too. Generate CA and Certificates To use OpenVPN securely, we’ll need certificates. Change the values (my_ca_name and 10.

In this article, we’ll install Plex Media Server on SmartOS. Plex Media Server is a media server that organizes and makes available audio, video, and more. Smart OS is a “converged container and virtual machine hypervisor” based on illumos, which is a fork of the now-defunct OpenSolaris. SmartOS supports Linux-branded containers (zones), allowing us to install Plex Media Server on SmartOS. These instructions might also work on other illumos distributions with some modifications.

This article will show how to compile ZFS on Linux 0.8.2 on Ubuntu 18.04 on ARM64, specifically the FriendlyElec NanoPi M4 single board computer, which has a four-port SATA HAT available. It also works great on other single-board computers, and I’ve successfully compiled and used ZFS on the Raspberry Pi. These instructions will likely work on other architectures supported by ZFS on Linux, such as x86_64. Install ZFS build requirements Use apt to install the packages needed to build ZFS 0.

This article will show how simple enabling GPU passthrough on your Proxmox VE 6.0 host is. My best experience has been with AMD GPUs, specifically the AMD Radeon Vega 56, AMD Radeon RX 580 and the newer NVIDIA GeForce 3060 Ti. Here, we will use an integrated Intel GPU, though, in an old Intel NUC. This guide can also be used to pass through other devices, such as NICs. This article assumes your hardware has the necessary support for virtualization, IOMMU, VFIO, and so on and that your hardware is running Proxmox VE 6.

Lunar Computer is off! 🚀

This site will publish various articles relating to systems development and operations. Topics will include Linux, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Docker, Kubernetes, Proxmox VE, SmartOS, and more. Articles on other unrelated topics may appear from time to time.

The purpose of this site is to share information and knowledge I’ve gathered over the years. The site is targeted at enthusiasts and regular labbers, but also professionals to some degree. It should be noted, however, that I do not claim these articles represent best practices. The pieces are also meant to be living documents and may change over time. They should not be considered to be static.

Stand by for the launch of the first articles later this week! 👩‍🚀

Revision

2023-08-31 Revised language