Guys I’m here for your opinion. I like my current homelab
Which looks like this:
-iGel thin client with pfsense on it
-Aruba S1500 48 PoE MAS
-Optiplex 9020 with the media crap on Truenas Scale
-Aruba AP 205 i think
It has been a great learning opportunity for me with firewalls , vlans , and so on, but I don’t think I’m where I want to be?. I setup Pfsense with 3 Vlans (mgmt, main ,and of course, IoT) then, I setup the same vlans on the switch, this wasn’t so bad since I put everything on a trunk port allowing traffic from/to anything and then filtering what goes through with firewall rules (I have no idea if this is best practice lol).
There are 3 trunk ports - the three of them allow all vlans to talk through there - I did this so I could have the access point do 2 diff wi-fi networks for IoT and main - but I have no idea if this was the best way to go about it, I also feel like the mgmt vlan is kind of not needed.
At some point, I stupidly installed some app updates on truenas scale and it broke everything, it broke all of my linux isos I torrented lol - which made me notice I don’t know shit about making my life easier with backups, snapshots and so on.
All of this confusion and kind-of-weird setup made want to re do everything, the right way. and here’s where I come to the pros out there so they can point me in the right direction or give me some tips/advice.
What is the right way?
Here’s all the hardware and plans I have :
-
Thinkserver RS140 ( planning on adding a 10Gib Nic to it and virtualizing PfSense on it), this would make the server have 2x10gib ports and 2x1gib port (there is one more 1Gib port for management)
-
Dell 3070 mini pc - I bought an adapter on aliexpress that uses the m.2 wlan port to add a second nic, I was thinking of installing proxmox on it, clustering it with the thinkserver, and virtualizing pf sense as well, and move the vm back and foward if I need to restart the Hypervisor so I can still have internet( is this even possible ? I was going through the HA documentation of netgate but none of them were specific enough, I don’t want fail over)
-
Since I hate the Aruba s1500 switch I got for free, I just want a good and nice managed switch that is small and it is fanless, I was thinking on buying the Ubiquiti Flex mini and also replace the Aruba AP with a unifi (one with wifi6, if possible)
-
For the optiplex 9020 I want to move the drive cage up (reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXpo3rresqo&ab_channel=EJTech), add a PCI thingy for more SATA ports and make it a bigger NAS, where I also want to run proxmox on it and virtualized truenas scale, maybe add a GPU that would be good for hardware encoding.
The reasoning behind virtualizing everything is that I can do snapshots of crap before everything goes to hell I want to have a solid foundation to build upon - is this how YOU would do it?
Is this a feasible plan? would you change things based on the hardware I have? Where can I get the right info about this stuff without getting so confused? I like networking, but imho, I would rather buy some hardware that makes vlans and stuff a little easier but maybe I need to man up and just learn it? Learning with the aruba crap made me hate it, so that is why I wanted to change to the flex mini + unify AP. I also read somewhere here that Unifi is very overpriced and I can get the same from mikrotik, not sure how accurate that is tho.
I’m sorry if this does not make sense at all, English is my second language and sometimes I don’t make sense lol. If something is not clear enough please ask me and I am more than happy to give more info./clarification.
Thanks for reading this far, I am really excited to read your insight / thoughts on my situation.