HomeLab - Bubbles' Home

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HomeLab

A collection of 13 posts

Server Upgrade 2026 (AI Readiness)

Server Upgrade 2026 (AI Readiness)

Around this time last year was my last significant upgrade to my home lab. I added a 64 core Ampere ARM server to my rack as a jack-of-all-trades to be my infrastructure's master node, equipped with a GPU for AI, and set up with a ZFS share as

2U Dual Mini ITX Chassis?

2U Dual Mini ITX Chassis?

2/10/2026 Update: TAWA has reached back to me regarding the availablility of the T2240 Chassis. This is huge news for me since this was the case I was most excited about - it looks incredibly great even though it was designed and manufactured 10+ years ago. And I

Actually making my Docker Swarm highly available

One of the chores I've been pushing asides for a while had to do with critical availability of some of the nodes in the Swarm cluster, which led to major downtime in a lot of the services I host. My Swarm cluster utilizes Raspberry Pi 5s as compute

Cooling the 2U Gaming Build

After sharing my previous build, I had a lot of questions around cooling performance. And due to the low thermal headroom I had (temps peaking at 95 degrees even with PBO disabled, although not thermal throttling), I wanted to improve the cooling situation. I had two options, going for a

Downsizing my 3U Gaming build to 2U

Downsizing my 3U Gaming build to 2U

2U is the best U, and you're wrong if you disagree. Considering that I only have 12 U's of precious space available on the rack, and how the rest of my rack-mount equipment is 2U or less, 3U just felt a little bit too chonky. When

Creating a ZFS+Samba Share (Ampere Build Finale)

Creating a ZFS+Samba Share (Ampere Build Finale)

Today the final pieces of this server arrived, the SATA SSDs to go into the hotswap bays. I really wanted a 4x8TB setup for a few reasons: * 8TB is the largest 2.5 SATA SSD that consumers can buy right now * Even if cost was a concern, I can always

Silencing the 2U Ampere Server (Build Log 3)

Silencing the 2U Ampere Server (Build Log 3)

Replacing the CPU cooler and Chassis Fans I heard that these Dynatron W1s were much better at cooling the CPUs than the stock passive cooler that comes with the Asrock Mobo bundle from Newegg, so I went ahead and grabbed one. An active cooler, especially one that is designed to

Setting up my Ampere Server (Build Log 2)

Setting up my Ampere Server (Build Log 2)

Today is the day, the Ampere CPU and motherboard finally arrived. I'm still waiting on the GPU, and I have not yet decided on the SSDs to use for a ZFS pool. So for today, I'm mostly focused on putting the server together and doing some

Ampere Server Build Log 1

Ampere Server Build Log 1

I had a need of a second prod-ready server and a few weeks ago, and the AIC RMC-2E chassis that I decided to order finally arrived. It's still empty inside, awaiting delivery of the rest of the server parts. AIC RMC-2E Reversible Front/Rear 2U Rackmount Chassis, 4

Power Outage

Had a 2 day long power outage, and wanted to document everything that went wrong. No UPS, No Redundancy, No Backups Firstly, I don't have a UPS for my server rack, and things could have been more disastrous for my NAS which currently has no redundancy nor backups.

I need one more Server!

I need one more Server!

Hear me out. I thought I had built the ultimate version of my home lab, just to realize I need one more server. Firstly, what was supposed to be my main powerhouse server ended up becoming my daily parsec rig. When I'm at home, I'll parsec

CDN-ing my Ghost blog

CDN-ing my Ghost blog

From pure pessimism after reading a reddit post around unwanted traffic due to image assets, the engineer in me wanted to make sure that everything I was building was following the best practices so that even when things blow up, it should minimally affect my servers. My self-hosted services run

Home Lab!

From top to bottom: * Ryzen 9900X + RTX 5000 ADA in a 3U Sliger CX3171 case * Raspberry Pi 5 Cluster on a Racknex SBC rack mount case * Ubiquiti UDM Pro * Hooked up to a Comcast Docsis 4.0 modem with 2-gig symmetric * And a Netgear LM1200 LTE modem as WAN2 failover