Домашняя лаборатория — homelab tour

Summary

Sergiy Petrenko gives a tour of the main rack in his home lab and explains how it supports networking, servers, home automation, and energy monitoring.

Network and Internet

• The house has a broad network with nine Wi-Fi access points. Some original cabling is built into the house, making it difficult to add or reroute connections.
• The setup grew out of equipment from Terminal 42, a coworking space Petrenko ran in Odesa. After the space closed, he repurposed its Cisco equipment at home before later moving to MikroTik.
• He now has two internet providers: one uses an XGS-PON terminal capable, in theory, of symmetrical 10 Gbps service; the other provides a long-standing GPON connection.
• A provider’s 2.5 Gbps service prompted a network upgrade. Fiber links and MikroTik switches now provide a nearly 10 Gbps optical core, with connections extending to workstations and other parts of the house.
• The main network devices are a MikroTik RB5009 router, a CRS309 optical switch, and a CSS610 switch. The RB5009 combines a 2.5 GbE port with gigabit ports and an SFP+ connection, while the CRS309 forms the 10 Gbps optical core.

Rack and Hardware

• The rack is in a utility room with a gas boiler and water pumps. The room is naturally ventilated and cool enough that the rack’s fans are not needed.
• A Synology DS918+ remains in the rack, although Petrenko says it is no longer his primary server.
• A headless Mac Studio M1 Max runs scheduled tasks, but macOS limitations make it less suitable for some server and automation jobs.
• The main server is an HP Gen8 machine (the exact model is unclear in the subtitles) running Proxmox. A second, experimental server is used for testing and sandboxed workloads; another machine is currently switched off.
• The servers’ built-in iLO management enables remote access even when they are powered down, avoiding the need for a separate KVM setup.
• Power is distributed through rack-mounted socket strips. A portable power station is used instead of a rack UPS, and some devices can use redundant power inputs.
• Petrenko notes that the rack’s cable management and overall appearance are imperfect, and that shorter patch cables are still on order.

Services and Automation

• Proxmox hosts virtual machines, including DNS services. Petrenko uses Unbound for caching and values its stability and its ability to synchronize a second node for DNS backup.
• A Raspberry Pi collects boiler telemetry and sends it to Home Assistant.
• A custom controller reads data from the solar inverter and can issue control commands directly, rather than relying on the manufacturer’s cloud. For example, it can charge the home battery from the grid overnight when the forecast suggests solar generation will be insufficient.
• Petrenko also plans to adjust boiler operation using a home weather station and custom sensors.
• Cloudflare Tunnels are used for some services. Workloads that proved unreliable on the headless Mac were moved to Linux virtual machines and containers on Proxmox.

Review, Guide, or Tutorial

This is a personal homelab tour and setup overview, not a step-by-step tutorial or formal product review. Petrenko shares practical preferences—particularly for MikroTik’s capabilities and price—and explains the reasoning behind his network, server, and automation choices.

Main Speaker and Source

• Sergiy Petrenko — the sole speaker and owner of the homelab shown.