I’ve got a backlog of posts I want to do on various topics. A couple of recent posts, I figured getting out something rough was better than not getting it out and just posted something that felt like it needed another draft or two. I’ll likely review those quickly posted items and update them as time permits.

I am in the process of building a Proxmox 8 Cluster with Ceph in an HA (high availability) configuration using very low-end hardware and questionable options for the various hardware buses. I’m going for HA, cheapfrugal and reuse of hardware that I’ve gathered up over the years.

Over the COVID lockdown, I was running a Plex Media Server (PMS) on an older Dell Optiplex 390 SFF Desktop that I cobbled into it several Seagate USB3 portable drives that I just slapped on it as I needed more space. It hosted my extensive VHS, DVD and BluRay library as I ripped them into digital formats. To improve the experience I threw a Nvidia Quadro P400 into the mix and a PCIe USB3 card for faster access to the drives. Eventually, I had some drive issues and wanted to get some additional reliability into the mix so tried out Microsoft Windows Storage Spaces (MWSS). Windows and the associated fun I had with MWSS left me incredibly frustrated and I was trying to make an enterprise product work in a low-end workstation with a bunch of USB drives. The thing that made me fully abandon MWSS was the recovery options when you had a bad drive. MWSS probably works well with solid enterprise equipment but was misery on the stuff I cobbled together. So exit Windows OS.

For about ten (10) years, I had run an VMWare ESXi server that let me play with new technology and host some content and services. I let it go awhile back while I was in graduate school and working full-time but have missed this as an option ever since. So adding a homelab server or cluster will let me get some of that back.

Adding another SSD Drive

In my etermal tinkering with my Lenovo Thinkpad T480s, I have continued the trend of adding new features. So earlier, in A new to me but old laptop and New Laptop update, I threw out a bunch of enhancement options. Some of those I’ve done and some I left on the backlog as things that just cost too much on my metric of usefulness per dollar. The WWAN SSD for extra storage was one of those that just seemed like a bad bang-for-the-buck for storage. I also like the option to add a SIM card and have cellular network available in case I have to go back to consulting on the road.

Recently, I have been bouncing between my two home office spaces, hotels and an occasional visit to a cubical in my companies building. My home office spaces are nicely equipped with dual 28” or larger monitors (which I’ll post about later), full office desks. I went overboard on some really nice high-end office chairs years ago as a business I worked for went under and sold off equipment and furniture. So my home office space is often nicer than what is provided at most businesses.