My homelab is focused on old arcane tech, designed around jbod and things I have traded for computers.
Most of my systems run Debian (oldstable) for reliability, with a few others running different flavors of BSD depending on the specific task they’re handling. I still have one Apple system in the mix, but the complexity of the T2 chip has made moving it cleanly to a non-Apple setup more trouble than it’s worth right now. I haven’t set aside the time to fully solve that, and I may ultimately replace it with different hardware better suited to the homelab.
I consider the “Glass” design language one of the worst UI/UX experiences I’ve encountered, and I have no desire to use it. Apple also offers no practical way to remain on older versions of macOS—once they’re abandoned, functionality degrades and security updates stop, forcing upgrades whether they make sense or not.
Years ago I invested in the best camera equipment I could afford at the time, and bought all the required infrastructure to be able to process photos off the camera or the card, along with more compact flash components. I also have some firewire drives and hardware that let me transfer files quickly.
The upside of that investment is that most of my photography work lives on disks I physically own and control. The only significant loss was the most recent 2.5 years, after Adobe pushed me into cloud storage, then deleted my backups when I attempted to download them. What started as a convenience quickly became unsustainable, with just a few terabytes of storage costing well over $100 per month.
The backplane is all ethernet.
There’s a system with jbod, that provides the long term storage, and a separate archival system to other external media.
I can still burn a CD or DVD.
My present gap is there is not an easy mechanism to port my iphone photos, given the newest version of the photos application, which obfuscates the library storage in a way previous versions of photos app did not. This is equally as frustrating as the ‘glass’ design. Also most iphone photos are .heic not raw, which adds another layer of complexity that I don’t know if I’ll ever take the time to solve.
OwnCloud is what I chose for the storage application, the reason behind the why has to do with that it comes with the mechanisms I want in a storage service. A web gui, federation between accounts, and reasonable applications that bring utility to contextual information in a storage system. The sync utility works as expected and keeps storage up to date.
Telephony
I have an over the top calling with asterisk so that I can easily receive calls to other devices without being dependent on something like ubiqitui for also providing phone service AND phones. Any computer can get a soft phone.
I have a hunt group for ringing first and second, and the ability to create a room, and offer hold music. Invaluable and worth the hours of engineering for that.
This book is a lifesaver for building a functional telephony system.
Archival reference
… though Strat’s work is veeeery helpful.
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