Tag: HomeLab

I have used Private Internet Access (PIA) Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnels for a number of years now and was keen to find out what else I could do with them. I setup a couple of VPN tunnels using OpenVPN on my pfSense firewall, one to PIA‘s London gateway and one to their Southampton gateway.…

As mentioned previously, I ordered my Dell R210 ii with a Pentium G620, the replacement Intel Xeon E3-1280 arrived from China after only 13 days. The swap-out was pretty straightforward, the seller a-zada had included a small pack of thermal paste which saved me from searching for some. Three of the four SDSA5AK 64GB half…

The previous post covered updating all of the firmware and some of the hardware configuration. I already mentioned that I installed 4 x 300GB 10K SAS drives. I performed some initial testing of XCP-NG and Xen Orchestra by mounting the ISO under the Virtual Media manager for the console and booting up to an install…

I decided that I wanted to have try some dedicated Virtual Machines (VMs) rather than Docker containers for some of my environments. Most of these would not require much by way of CPU, RAM or disk space, so I thought a second hand Dell R210 ii server would be a good fit. The server is…

Way back in 2009, I purchased a 2 post 19″ 8U desktop rack from Ebay for £8.50 and £3.00 P&P. I do not have a picture of the actual item, but it looks a lot like the one below, except it uses round tubing and has threaded holes rather than using cage nuts. As part…

The firewall and routing capabilities of my Ubiquiti UDM-Pro are OK if you are a home user and not super interested in granularity of logging, multiple WAN IPs or complex routing, however pfSense does a much better job. I decided I wanted to install a pfSense firewall, mainly as a learning experience, but also to…

  Many websites these days do not like you using traditional ad blockers such as Adblock Plus. Yahoo, for example will not even let you use their latest mail interface if you are using an ad blocker. Another alternative is to use something that blocks adverts at the DNS level such as Pi-Hole, you then…

Not long after Installing the CCTV cameras, Ubiquiti brought out some new cloud keys, one of which has a built in NVR and runs their new Protect CCTV software, this being the UCK-G2-PLUS. This NVR is constantly recording from all of your attached cameras and comes with an internal 1TB drive, it also functions as…

Now that my network was reasonably stable, I decided I wanted to expand my use of the Ubiquiti Unifi products to include some of their CCTV camera range. Initially I purchased 3 of the outdoor UVC-G3-AF cameras. But quickly added 3 of the indoor UVC-G3-Flex cameras. Rather than purchase an NVR device, I decided to…

I have known for a while that the brick walls in my house were likely to be my biggest barrier to decent wi-fi coverage, but I wasn’t really sure just how bad they were. A few years back I drew up my house in Visio and one of the tabs shows the whole house with…