So I'll try to give a summary from beginning where my FTTH services comes into my house to the end where my Media Room PC sits quietly at the end. This is just a basic summary for now as i've kind of wiped the slate clean as it was an absolute mess. My NAS was in the ML350 G6 which was causing issues to the P400i embedded RAID card from all the heat of 8x 3.5

So living in Nova Scotia Canada has it's perks, one is that we're lucky to have one of the best Fiber to the Home ISP's in North America! I get about 300MB/s down and 150MB/s upload all with super low pings for a very reasonable monthly price.

The ISP's modem is some Actiontec thing, but I replaced it with the Asus RT-N66U which works great! This also allows me to have a guest wifi for people to connect to without having access to everything behind my firewall. This actually saves me tons of time from dealing with a lot of port issues since Sophos UTM is so tight.

CAT5e comes into the Sophos UTM (OEM 2550L2D-MxPC) and departs to my Netgear GSM7224 24-port switch (which I managed to pickup for $50 #WIN!) which is the main center for all my network traffic routing.

ESXi 6 Servers

  • ML350 G6
  • 1x Xeon X5560
  • 32GB ECC Ram

Will replace the X5560 with 2x L5640's eventually and add another 32GB of ram. This currently has primarily most of the engine to drive my Kodi library and some stuff I'm currently testing. Since moving from the basic Kodi MySQL Library Sync to Emby I've been happy. I'll talk more about that in my planned Home Theatre PC Post.

  • Sun Fire X2270 M2
  • 2x Xeon X5620
  • 32GB Ram

Nice small 1U with plenty of power to play around with. Just hosts some homelab specific stuff like vCenter and Veeam backup server. Lots of room & power for future projects.

Rockstor NAS

  • Custom Built Low Power AMD Machine
  • AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini Quad-Core 2.05 GHz
  • ASRock AM1B-M AM1 Motherboard
  • 8GB Ram
  • M1015 RAID Card
  • 4x 3TB WD Red
  • 2x 3TB HGST Deskstar NAS
    • 15TB BRTFS RAID5 Array

Benefits of having a standalone machine for my NAS allow me to have complete control and no reliance on other systems. This is important to be because if a good deal were to come up on a newer 4U server the ML350 will be for sale. This NAS will be my long term(planned 5-10 years) storage solution for my network. Arrays will most likely be added and I'm sure a Motherboard swap will be necessary in the future due to the limited PCIe slots (1-16x & 1-1x) SAS Expander only uses PCIe for power, not for data connection so there are ways for me to expand my drive options but the basis of this machine is planned for long term service.

You can read more about why I choose Rockstor in my upcoming/developing Rockstor NAS Build posts.

NAS Currently sits in some CoolMaster Elite case, will move to a proper rack mount hotswap chassis shortly.

Security System

  • Xpenology - Surveillance Station
  • 2x Foscam FI9803P
  • 1x Xiaomi Xiaoyi Wireless IP Camera - Testing for indoor use
  • Custom RaspberryPi Camera

This is a project i've been working on for years, long before I ever got into having a real homelab back when I ran Linux VM's via VirtualBox on my OC'd Q8200 that didn't even support VT-x. I've played around with BlueIris, WebCamXP/Netcam Studio, Motion and several others and Synology's Surveillance Station is the one that tickles my fancy and is worth my $$. I would spend the money on an actual Synology box but they're rather expensive and do so much more than I want but not enough to replace a server, so unfortunately I'm stuck going the route of Xpenology which works just fine for me.

The purpose is mostly for personal interest and stuff like my curiosity of when the fedex guys delivered my package, what my cats are doing via live feed during the day while I'm at work. I mostly was interested in testing & developing my own IP Camera's using RaspberryPi's until my car was broken into last year overnight in my driveway and that's when I decided to buy the Foscam's with IR and start taking it more seriously. Unfortunately nothing was running during that night but fortunately only my fiance's make-up bag was stolen which seemed to be a really big deal to her, apparently it was like a limited edition kate spade bag or something of the sorts and had $600+ worth of make-up in it....

Media Room HTPC

The reason I'm where I am with all these computers and network cables.

  • My Main Machine
  • AMD FX-8320 Black Edition
  • BIOSTAR TA970 v.5.3 AM3+ Motherboard
  • Radeon R7 370
  • 32GB Ram
  • Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSD + 2x 1TB WD Greens
  • Windows 10 Enterprise
  • TV
  • Panasonic ZT60 - Last of the best plasma's ever made
  • Sound
  • Sony STRDN1060 7.2 AV Receiver
  • Paradigm Reference Center Channel Speaker
  • Paradigm Monitors for rear surround & Old Fisher's w/ 12-inch bottoms for Main L & R
  • No sub currently due to noise from Fishers and lack of soundproofing of my media room

This room is my favorite place to be, relax and surf the web, watch YouTube or TV, sleep and eat. We've been in the market for new seating since we moved into our house 2 years ago but still have the old couch I bought when my fiance and I moved in together back when we were 19 and in university.

When we moved into the house, I had planned on a 110" projection system for the room but decided to wait it out for 4K and just buy a large TV. I started doing research and discovered how incredible these Panasonic Plasma's were, the room is in the basement and it's dark due to the blackout blind being broken and no longer rolling up so a plasma was the perfect fit. I finally found someone that still had one in their inventory and paid full price for a TV almost 2 years old - and was it ever worth it! The amazing TV paired with incredible sound, it's a beautiful experience and one that has led me down a road of my relatively expensive high powered homelab and a shit ton of opportunity to break stuff and figure out how to fix it.

Updates to come.....