Homelab

Many of you might know Pi-hole and use it for blocking ADs. I also used it for a long time in my homenetwork, running it on a Raspberry Pi. A customer of mine then drew my attention to dnsforge.de.

What is dnsforge.de?

dnsforge.de is a censorship-free, secure and redundant DNS resolver without logging, but with an ad blocker.

The server are hosted in Germany. dnsforge.de also offers clean.dnsforge.de, which offers parental control blocklists and Safe Search for search engines and YouTube.

This blog post covers the setup of the volumes and shares. Depending on your disk config, variuos volume configurations are possible. The DS414slim supports all important RAID levels (Synology Hybrid RAID, Basic, JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10). I recommend to use RAID 5, if you use more then two disks. I decided to create a RAID 5 with my three Crucial M550 SSDs and use the Seagate Momentus XT as a single disk.

A discourse is going on in the community. I can’t say who has started the discourse, but the number of blog postings to this discourse is an indication for the interest at this topic. But what’s the topic?

Homelabs

A homelab is the datacenter of the poor man. Some people have the luck to use a fully populated data center for test and study purposes. Our job requires to work with the latest technology and products, so we need an environment for test- and study purposes. Back in the days it was sufficient to have some VMs on you computer or laptop. But as virtualization moved into the data center, it was necessary to have this in the lab. At this point homelabs began to explode.

While playing around in my lab, I wanted to enable VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)  for a VM. In the absence of physical HW I use a nested enviroment, which is running on a HP ProLiant DL160 G6 (2x Intel Xeon E5520, 32G RAM, a RAID 0 with 4 SATA drives). FT isn’t available in nested enviroments, because HW virtualization features are required. This screenshot was taken from the web client.