24 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
24 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
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<header>
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<h1>A Birth In The Family</h1>
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</header>
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<p>Several months ago, I was waxing poetic about starting out my lab with a Raspberry Pi; I was touting low power consumption, low cost, and a small form factor as the driving factors that got me into them. Let Covid-19 kick in, and here we are with a way larger lab than I have expected.</p>
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<h2>Our New Members</h2>
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<ul>
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<li>Raspberry Pi 4 4GB</li>
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<li>2-Bay HDD Dock with USB 3.0</li>
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<li>HP Prodesk G3 SFF</li>
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</ul>
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<h2>But Why?</h2>
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<p>While Covid-19 is certainly one of the most tragic events in human history, it has finally forced companies to embrace remote work. I'm very thankful that my work environment already has a mature and secure infrastructure in place to enable my work without any hiccups. The transition was seamless and we spent little effort to get used to it. One of the largest benefits is the amount of money and time saved. No more hours wasted taking the light rail, no money wasted on buying expensive takeout. So I used some of this money to expand the lab.</p>
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<h2>More Space</h2>
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<p>At first, I got the RPi 4 with the HDD dock because I wanted to toy with larger disk spaces and file shares. I managed to acquire a pair of 3TB disks for cheap and deployed as a Btrfs RAID 1 pair. Why not ZFS you say? Mainly because I do not have ECC memory on my Raspberry Pi 4; I'm also not a huge fan of veering too far from the officially supported repos for the RPi. Nevertheless, learning the tooling and technology behind Btrfs was a enjoyable experience. The opportunity to experiment with larger file sizes very much motivated me to play around with benchmarking tools such as iperf, hdparm, etc. There is a certain tangible satisfaction to transferring Linux ISOs back and forth for really no reason.</p>
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<h2>More Power</h2>
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<p>July kicked in and the novelty wore off, so I started to get slightly frustrated by Raspbian's limitations. (Yes, I know it's Raspberry Pi OS now, but it just doesn't roll off the tongue anymore) For example, the stable LXC version is still stuck at 1.x, which means that it was lacking the bells and whistles provided in version 2.x; or which others would say, the modern LXC. Virtualization was off the table. As this website grew in size, I felt uncomfortable experimenting in my "Production" system anymore. A bit of searching later, I managed to get my hands on a x86 system with a i5-6500 and 8GB of RAM.</p>
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<p>I'm not going to rehash Proxmox vs ESXi as it has already been done to death. Getting to play with Proxmox was an exhilarating experience. The SFF size also meant it did not take up a lot of space nor make a lot of noise. Anyway, there is a lot on my table now because I'm studying for LFCE certification. I certainly am happy that I have more resources to enable my learning process.</p>
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