Technology, marketing, networking and the odd gadget review.
Plus all the other random stuff that crosses my mind: Hypervisors, VLANs, storage and backups, GPUs, Monitors, Keyboards. Twenty years of digital marketing leaks in from time to time, and so does football (LFC related). Read on at your own peril.
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Latest Posts
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D-Link DXS-F108T Review: Eight 10G Ports for S$340
A fast, honest little L2 switch with a web UI that will eat your work if you let it.
I spent most of a Saturday moving my house from an unmanaged 10G switch to a managed one, and the switch I picked was the D-Link DXS-F108T — eight 10GBASE-T ports, web management, S$340. Here’s what it actually does, what the datasheet gets wrong, and the four ways its firmware will bite you.
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Five Copies, Two and a Half Fault Domains
3-2-1 is the rule everyone quotes. Three copies of your data, on two different media, with one offsite. It is a good floor and it is easy to think you have cleared it when you have not.
I counted my copies earlier this year and got five. Primary NAS (NAS1), secondary NAS (NAS2), a cold box, a drive at the office, and OneDrive. Comfortably past the bar. Then I counted what could fail independently and got roughly two and a half.
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Where Guest Network Pro Runs Out
The topology post ended on a promise. I said Guest Network Pro on the RT-BE88U would let me finally segment the IoT and media gear off the main network, and that having hardware which supported it natively removed my last excuse for not doing it.
It removed about seventy percent of the excuse. This is where the other thirty percent lives.
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The Layer the Cable Map Doesn’t Show
I’ve already drawn the cables. This is where the packets actually go.
Back in May I published the full topology of the house: every switch, every 10G run, every zone. That was the easy half. Cables tell you what’s physically possible. They tell you nothing about where a DNS query goes, which door a request came through, or why one machine’s traffic leaves the country and another’s doesn’t. If you go back far enough in this blog, you would have noticed that I’ve been using the Asus RT routers since the original N56U (in 2011!). While they can do most of the basic functions (and some of the advanced ones with the Merlin firmware), I’ve taken advantage of my homelab to add on a few more bells n whistles.
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I Built a Dashboard for the Things I Actually Check
Five separate logins became one page. The interesting part was how often I turned out to be wrong.
I check five things regularly: whether the homelab is healthy, my portfolio, my health trend, whatever trip is coming up, and my to-do list. Each one lived somewhere different. Each had its own login. None of them talked to each other. I have to go looking for information by opening a browser, going to my bookmarks page and finding the right tile to click: