Tag: UPS

Homelab Chronicles 13: A Year in Review

Homelab

As I said in my last post, I recently moved. Which mean that all the work I did in my last apartment is gone. That was mostly physical infrastructure work, particularly the cabling. So now I get to do it again; joy!

But before I get into the new place, I should visit some topics from the past. An update of sorts. Just because I haven’t posted in a year doesn’t mean the homelab has sat untouched for a year.

UPS Delivered!

Back in April, I finally bit the bullet. I bought a “CyberPower PFC Sinewave Series CP1000PFCLCD – UPS – 600-watt – 1000 VA.” I wanted something that would communicate with ESXi to initiate a “semi-graceful” auto-shutdown if wall power was lost.

PowerPanel dashboard, showing the UPS status as normal and full charged.

I say “semi-graceful” since with my setup, I only have ~17min of battery life. That covers three devices: my server, my Unifi Secure Gateway (USG), and a 5-port Unifi Flex-mini Switch.

Via the accompanying PowerPanel software, I can monitor battery status, while also configuring the shutdown behavior in for ESXi. I actually have PowerPanel installed as a separate VM in ESXi. Probably not the best idea, but it works.

Back to the semi-graceful shutdown, VMs sometimes take time to properly shutdown, especially Windows Server. So between ESXi and PowerPanel, I give some time for the VMs to gracefully shutdown. But if they don’t shutdown in time, then ungraceful shutdown of VMs occur, before ESXi gracefully powers down.

Took a bit of testing to get it all figured out, but it does work. At my last apartment, there were a couple of brief blackouts or brownouts. The UPS did exactly what it needed to do.

My (Home) Assistant Quit on Me

The very last post of 2023 was me futzing around with Home Assistant. I had a “concept of a plan” to automate some of my smart home devices.

After getting it installed, though, I didn’t really do much more with it. Stupid, I know.

Unfortunately, at some point towards the end of 2023 or beginning of 2024, the HAOS VM bit the dust.

“Failed to power on virtual machine…File system specific implementation of LookupAndOpen[file] failed.”

I don’t exactly know what happened, or when it happened. But I know there was a power outage one night. A storm, I think. Before I had my UPS…

I can’t say for certain the power outage was the reason. After all, it was at least a couple weeks later that I realized HAOS wasn’t turned on. When I tried turning it back on, I got that message, and have ever since.

I did look into this error message a little bit. But I think reinstalling HAOS is the better choice. Especially since I didn’t do any further setup anyway.

Glad I have the UPS now 🙂

Playing with Proxmox

Over the last year or two, the big news in the virtualization space is VMWare selling out to Broadcom. And Broadcom absolutely trying to squeeze out every last penny in licensing. Recently, AT&T disclosed that Broadcom was seeking a 1050% price increase on licensing.

I’m still using ESXi/vSphere 6.5 U3 on older than 10yrs old server. Which is fine, but at some point I’ll need to replace the hardware and software. Unfortunately, there are no more perpetual, free licenses for non-commercial purposes. I never even got a 7.0 license.

With that in mind, I thought it’d be interesting to play with Proxmox, which is a FOSS virtualization platform. As such, I installed it on another server I had lying around. Unlike ESXi, Proxmox is nowhere near as user friendly. And the documentation that’s available is pretty poor, in my opinion.

That’s one of the reasons FOSS sometimes annoys me: it’s often not very accessible to anyone who’s not already an expert. But that’s a topic for another post.

The first thing I wanted to do was connect my current NFS-based OS ISOs storage to Proxmox. This way, I wouldn’t have to use extra drive space on the new Proxmox server by copying over an ISO. If the data exists on the network, use it! This NFS share is hosted on my primary Windows Server VM.

I was able to point Proxmox to the NFS. However, Proxmox wanted to use its own directory structure within that NFS. I found that rather annoying. This wouldn’t be where the Proxmox VMs live, after all. It’s simply where the ISOs are. Why should I have to rearrange the directory structure and files just for Proxmox?

I honestly don’t remember if I created a VM after all that. I don’t remember if it worked or not. But given the situation with VMWare, that won’t be the last time I play with Proxmox.

Let’s Get Physical, Physical (Again)

The last thing to report is minor, but worth mentioning. I ended up adding two more Ethernet runs. The important one being from one room to another, underneath the carpet and along the baseboards. Ah, the joys of apartment living.

Anyway, that’s not that big of a deal. I had already done it once, after all.

Rather, it was the idea that led to this. In my old apartment, the Google Fiber jack (ONT) was in the living room. The guest room down the hall served as the “server closet.” The server, Unifi AP, main switch, UPS, and other devices were in the guest room. But the Unifi Secure Gateway (USG) was in the living room, since the Internet point of entry was there. Which seemed strange to me. I wanted all the main gear in the guest room.

It’s hard to explain without a map or diagram, so I’ll use some. This is the diagram of my original layout:

My original setup at my last apartment. Simple, if not a bit overkill.

To move the USG to the guest bedroom, there were two ways to achieve this. One was by adding a second run from the living room to the guest bedroom. One run would connect the fiber jack to the WAN side of the USG. The other run would connect from the LAN side of the USG back to the switch in the living room.

But I wondered if it was possible to do this:

Note that the USG doesn’t have that many ports; I forgot to add a second switch in that room, but the idea still stands.

Essentially, could a WAN connection go through a VLAN? Because if it could, I wouldn’t have to run another cable. I looked it up and even asked on reddit. And the answer was yes, this is entirely possible and not that unusual!

Unfortunately, when I tried to do this, it didn’t work. It even caused me some more issues with the Unifi controller being inaccessible while it wasn’t working.

In the end, I just laid a second down a second Ethernet run. Maybe I gave up too quickly, but sometimes the easiest solution…is simply the easiest solution 🤷‍♂️

So that was last year in the life of the homelab. Not as much as I wanted to do, but it was at least something. And that’s the point, right? To at least play around with it and learn something.

Homelab Chronicles 03 – I Need a UPS ASAP

Homelab

The power went out recently in my neighborhood. Neighboring buildings were completely dark, as was mine. I was cooking dinner at the time, so not only was I hungry, but I was also in the dark.

And so was the server. Now I don’t host any crucial services on there. It’s a Homelab; it’s just for funsies. But I still need to get an uninterruptable power supply (UPS), at least to allow for graceful shutdown when these rare outages happen. Twice the power tried to come on minutes after the outage. That means power went out three times; two of those times, the server got power for just a moment before turning off again, since I have the machine set to automatically start after power failure. I don’t know what that does to a machine, but it can’t be good. Especially an old boy like mine.

That said, I don’t expect I’ll get a long-lasting UPS. The outage was long: 45 minutes. There’s no way I could keep a server going for that long on a UPS. At least one that I could afford. Plus, it’d be worthless to do so since everything else was unpowered: my computers, the router and switches, the fiber jack, etc. So I only need something that can last 10-15min. It’d also be nice if it the UPS had someway to trigger a shutdown of ESXi, but that might be asking too much.

I’ve researched this before, but I think I’ll get back on it. Maybe even a refurbished one is good enough.

On a side note, this will lead to my next task: setting up those Conditional DNS Forwarders I mentioned in my previous post. When the power did come back on, the router and Internet fiber jack came on quickly. But since DNS is on the server, and the server takes like 10 minutes total to boot, then for ESXi to boot, then the Window Server to boot, I didn’t have Internet during that time. First World Problem at home, sure, but in a business environment, that could be pretty annoying, especially if the issue is a server being down, while everything else is up.

Yes, that was my view above during the outage. Yes, those buildings had power, while I had none. I guess I live on the edge of a neighborhood grid. The buildings to the side and “behind” me had no power, while those in “front” of me did.

Honestly, it was kind of nice to sit in the darkness for 45min. I had my phone, so it wasn’t terrible. But I was still hungry.