Home-Lab on karl

Arris SB8200 Prometheus Exporter

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a very short “announcement” post.

To beef up my home-lab observability stack, I’ve been working on a few projects to expose more data to Prometheus. Getting metrics from my cable modem has been on the “todo” list for literally years. There have been various metric exporters written in the past but they have either been archived/deleted off of GitHub or are otherwise inappropriate for my needs. So, I wrote my own.

I made a thing: GPS/PPS clock source for ntpd

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Tip

This is just a ‘pointer’ post.

All the details are in the kquinsland/yet-another-gps-pps-opnsense repo on github.

For the longest time, I had a dedicated raspberry pi with a GPS module acting as the ntp server for my home network. I chose to use a dedicated host for this because my router - at the time - did not have a serial port that I could leverage.

Adding an APC UPS to Home Assistant energy dashboard

Sun, 05 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

EDIT: (2021-09-19): After some back and forth with /u/Laxarus, there is now a simpler method! The snmp platform still does not support setting device_class, but wrapping the sensor in another template sensor is not required; just do so in your customize.yaml. I have called this out below.

This is another quick “here’s how I did it, hope this help” post.

In preparation for the inevitable grid brownouts that summer 2021 would bring, I installed a rather beefy UPS for my home network / lab. After some browsing, I discovered a local eWaste liquidator with a really good deal on some second-hand APC UPSs.

PoE powered Stack Light

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The lights are much brighter than they appear in this picture; had to intentionally darken the image to prevent camera from blowing out the colors.

Stack/signal lights are everywhere in industrial applications for good reason: they’re a compact and relatively information-dense indicator system. They always seemed like the kind of indicator that only people with expensive machines needed. Until I found that they can be had for just under $6/light from Ali Express, that is.

Monitoring APC AP7900 switched PDU with Prometheus and Grafana

Sun, 27 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The APC AP7900 is a 1U single phase PDU with 8 switchable outlets and a network interface. It’s been EoL’d and can be had for less than 20% of it’s original price on eBay. The network interface is so underpowered tha it can’t support any modern cryptographic ciphers.

So with that, here’s a revised copy of my notes from the process of getting the device reset, updated and monitored.

home lab: simple printable cable org

Sat, 18 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Quick / another “i made a thing!” post.

Picture showing designed parts deployed as intended (please ignore the lingering dust! 💨)

I needed some horizontal / vertical cable rings for cat5 and power cables. I would have used the excellent 1U Rackmount Cable Management Rings by boulwarek except the hole spacing didn’t work for my application. I needed cable rings for the ‘front-to-back’ braces which have distinct dimensions:

home lab: mini 'universal' patch panel

Sun, 05 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is another brief “i made a thing!” posts.

Version 2

Update 2020-12-12: I outgrew version 1! I needed a few more ports and didn’t have much time… so I just scaled the part up to double the number of jacks. The links below and the thingiverse and prusaprinters links have been updated w/ the new STL files. Printing and attachment works exactly the same as with the 1x8 version. Rather than include the Fusion360 source, I have included a standard STEP file.

home lab: consolidating multiple PSUs

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A while back, I traded writing salt states and managing systemd .service files wrapping podman for the ‘simplicity’ of running kubernetes in my home lab. Jury is still out on weather or not the switch was worth it.

The cluster is a hodgepodge of second hand Intel NUCs and other scavenged compute hardware i’ve collected over the past few years. Some of it runs on 12v, some of it on 19v. For each node, there’s a dedicated switch mode power supply. Each supply takes up an outlet and brings a bit of cable mgmt related clutter. The solution is consolidation.