Eric: I have a co-located server that's about to become a decision that I'll either live to regret, or maybe I can get it right. So today I'm talking to the guy who builds the hardware I'm considering buying next. So if you're ready, jump in and let's talk about what kind of hardware Eric should buy for his home lab next. Hey there, and welcome to the IT Guy Show. I'm your host, Eric, the IT Guy Hendricks. It was almost as if that was planned. Today, I'm talking to Zack from 45HomeLab. If you're from the enterprise side, you might know the company 45Drives. They make enterprise-grade storage backends. They really promote this whole build it, customize it, and fix it yourself kind of mentality. So it's not a black box. It's pick your parts and put it all in a chassis, and they've got different tiers. But one thing that 45Drives figured out was that there's a whole bunch of nerdy people out there like myself and like most of you who have home labs some of which have very very large storage pools some of which are running ai models or your plex servers or the infamous minecraft server that the kids always complain when things are down, so i reached out to 45 home lab and zach responded that he would be more than happy for me to kind of pick his brain a little bit about my home lab, my current setup, and what kind of hardware I should get. So with that in mind, let me introduce you to Zack Perry. Zack, welcome to the IT Guy Show, man.

Guest: Hey, thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Eric: Yeah, and you know, we were talking in the green room that you have a fantastic microphone and just great, great presence. And so I knew your expertise in the field would be something that my audience would really, really appreciate. Yeah. So with that said, why don't you, I always start out easy. You know, I'll give you the easy questions first. We'll get into the hard, tricky ones later. But why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and then always something you do for fun.

Guest: Okay so yeah my name is zachary perry i've been part of 45Drives here for it'll be six years in october part of the solution specialist team and i also do some obviously our home lab channel small r&d work projects kind of a jack of all trades sort of deal i let's see what do i do for fun oh i usually had to think there for a second the uh

Eric: I know the.

Guest: Feeling yeah the well video games, of course. Tinkering with my home lab, even though sometimes that is more frustration than enjoyment, depending on what I'm doing. But I also volunteer at our local animal shelter pretty frequently there. I do that on the weekends. So small plug, if you have an animal shelter in your area, please donate to them. They need it. But yeah, that's one of the big things that I do kind of in my free time.

Eric: That's awesome. And as a dog dad myself, I really appreciate those folks that, take care of those shelters. I speak for a living and all the animals they're in. I don't know how you do it, man. I would see all those faces and they'd all come home with me and they wouldn't fit in my 1300 square foot apartment.

Guest: Oh, it's rough, especially what kind of dog do you have?

Eric: She's an Australian Shepherd, seven years old.

Guest: Beautiful. I think the same thing all the time. And I just have a small bungalow style home. Funny enough today, I went in about two hours before we hopped on here and it was like, oh, we got two new dogs in, uh, their names are teensy and weensy. And I was like,

Eric: Oh, that means they're going to be massive.

Guest: Two St. Bernards, 140 and 170 pounds. And I was like, I want to take them home, but nope, not going to do it.

Eric: Well, more power to you, my friend. I'm glad you were able to resist teensy and weensy.

Guest: That's awesome.

Eric: Okay, so we're here to talk about 45HomeLab, but that wasn't the origin story. So take us back. Tell us a little bit about 45Drives and the enterprise storage offerings that 45Drives loves to promote. Yeah, so we.

Guest: Started in 2014, 2015. I'm actually making servers for Backblaze. Because of our protocase division, which is our sister company that does the electronic enclosures for all of our Storinator, our 45Drives systems, our home lab systems, everything all around that. And from there, we actually used to, FreeNAS was pretty much what we would send out if somebody wanted a UI on their system. Since then, we now have our own UI built on the cockpit project called the Houston UI, freely available for anybody to download and integrate into their own system if they're running Ubuntu 22, Rocky 9, or if you're running something older with Ubuntu 20 or Rocky 8. Obviously there's going to be some things that aren't going to work there. Like the, we have a drive alias saying motherboard feature. So if it's not one of the motherboards that we have might get a little funky there, but yeah, we started using that. And now in the most recent last few years, we've expanded to the U S we have an office in Wilmington. I'm currently in Sydney, Nova Scotia up in Canada. And we've expanded again from there with our not just ultra dense storage servers but now we also have our proxinator we're big on the anators with a lot of our solutions here we have our destroy anator for wiping up to 60 drivers drives at once or nvmes now then we also have our stornado and then we have the actually funny enough now i think about the home lab division does not have any of The Anators, they're just plain Jane, just Homelab 15, HL15. But yeah, from there, we keep expanding, keep doing great stuff. And it's just really interesting to see how the company's evolved over the last few years. And then into, of course, 45 Homelab, which is a little bit of, like you said, you have your nerdy people who a lot of them are in enterprise. A lot of them do like our products and everything. But you're not going to put a an xl60 with 60 hard drives especially nowadays with the prices of everything

Eric: Oh gosh yeah.

Guest: Yeah and it just allows for that barrier of entry but having something with that same 45Drives enterprise quality build that customer service not to kind of humble brag myself here because i am part of that department but yeah being able to offer that to people in Homelab is pretty great.

Eric: So what was kind of the driver between the additional brand of having 45 Homelab?

Guest: I think the main thing with it was that we wanted somebody or we wanted people who one knows about our 45Drives division. But like I said, they want to have something smaller, more of a home lab sort of build. And then other people who want that kind of are looking for a home lab. Maybe they're getting into it for the first time, but they want to kind of go upper echelon to like something a little more premium feeling quality build because we do use that 16 gauge steel for everything everything is customizable there's no lock-in if you want to change out the cpu the ram the motherboard itself as long as it fits you're not going to break anything it's basically do whatever you want with it and that's something that we want to bring from the 45Drives division to home lab for those type of people like myself and yourself

Eric: Yeah and if you if you haven't seen the 45 home lab devices definitely head out to the website which, by the way, will be in the show notes. These machines are gorgeous. I mean, some of them, they come with everything but racing stripes. So, fantastic looking machines. So, I feel like, and kind of the impetus for the episode was, I feel like I'm at a really good place to be your target customer. Because right now, sitting in a co-located data center just a few miles from my apartment is a Dell PowerEdge R720. And if you're not familiar with the R720, it's about six to eight years old now. I may be older than that. And it's the type of enterprise-grade storage server that sounds like a jet engine when it spins up for about a good 45 seconds. And so I have a 1,300-square-foot apartment with two bedrooms. Not an ideal use case. When I had a house and a basement with a 42-use storage rack, it was great. It blended right in. And it was in the basement, so it was cool and dry. So now my home internet connection is a 3GB symmetrical through Google Fiber. The colo is limited to one gig, like we're in the Stone Age or some nonsense here. So I'm really, really wanting to, one, not have to pay a co-located data center for a server. Second of all, the hardware is getting old. Third of all, it's enterprise grade, and I refuse to pay the $1,000 or some crazy nonsense to Dell for the IPMI port on it. So there's just a lot of reason why I want to move away from my current build. So what I'm thinking about is, do I want to use mini PCs as kind of an application tier, run Proxmox or XCPNG, and then have a storage server, or do I just want to go all out on one big box and move all my storage and all my, kind of like it is today, my PowerEdge is running, used to run Unraid, it's run TrueNAS in the past, and now it's sitting on Proxmox. So there's, I mean, you've probably lived this a thousand times, but this is kind of the world that I'm living in. And, like prosumer grade hardware is just everywhere now. And using a mini PC as an application node, as a virtual machine host sounds like a great plan. But do I really need a cluster? Do I just want to run Proxmox like I am now and just get newer hardware, something that's quiet that I can bring into my apartment? That's kind of where I'm at. So while you chew on that, we'll kind of get to some of the use cases here in a minute. But why don't you tell me my options here? What's some of the product lineup that folks can go dig their teeth into?

Guest: Yeah, so I'll start from the smallest and kind of work my way up there. So you have your home client, which is just a SBC kind of motherboard there, integrated CPU up to 16 gigs of DDR5. It's good for small applications. Like if you're going to be running a small internal Plex server, things like that. If you're using it just as a regular desktop client, fantastic. Up from there, you have your workstation, a little bit bigger, can fit a low profile 4060 in it. Uses again, DDR5, which I believe can go up to 64 gigs. It's has an AMD Ryzen. The CPU has escaped me at the moment, but it uses the AORUS B550i. I live in acronyms and numbers land, especially being in the solution side. So sometimes they get jumbled up, but, um, with the workstation, actually I have one at home and currently I have been just going through crimson desert playing that just nonstop on that thing. And it holds up really well. Like I'm don't drop below 60 frames a second. It is, and I have it streaming to my steam deck because I'm lazy and don't want to sit in a chair all day, but, um. It's running from like most of the settings are medium high. And mind you, that's an old one. We actually ship it out with the 5060 now low profile. Then up from there, we have our HL4 and HL8. Most people go with the HL8 because I think it's maybe $100 in the difference. And I mean, you get double the capacity to upgrade in the future. It has a clamshell design. So you would just take the front corkscrews, I call them, off there. And then it just kind of clamshells open from there where it exposes all the wires, the CPU, the drive cage. And again, fully modular uses a mini ITX board in it from there you would have. And this is kind of where you can get into your proxmox hosting and things like that with the HL four and eight. That is what I was using previously until I moved to a HL 15 2.0 myself with some other hardware there. We had a previously so my last home lab was something that i put together well i didn't actually When I got hired here, a little side tangent, I didn't come from an IT background or anything. I was a warehouse manager. Before that, I was working out west in Alberta as a tower mechanic. Mind you, this is climbing up 120-foot towers in the middle of the night. I have a fear of heights. So I didn't...

Eric: Oh, goodness.

Guest: Yeah, but the money was great. So I was like, I also don't want to do this for the next 30 years. But from there, I was like, okay, I'm going to start my CompTIA doing my A+. And then I started and I see them job for 45Drives come up. They want you to have a college degree. And I was like, eh, worst thing you can do is not respond or say no. They decided to take a chance on me, kind of a guinea pig sort of thing. Me and another colleague, and we're both here six years later. So must have worked out in some regard. But I really wanted to get a handle on everything that we have. Because when I started, it was Sentos 7, Freenas, I think 10, maybe, or 9. I can't remember. Although, and from there, I was like, hey, I see we have some old components here. I wanted to buy them. And one of the owners of the company and our current CTO, who was actually doing support tickets back then, they were like, yeah, let's talk to you for a second out here. They take me to the lab. I was like, oh God, am I getting fired? And they're like, oh no, we're talking to Doug. They want to give you this stuff for free. You're planning to learn. you want to be self-sufficient we think that's great but i just upgraded it this year and it was a X10DRL motherboard with two xeon bronze cpus in it and last year i actually bought two cooling fans for them there and they were so large that the fins actually like were Kind of shifting in between each other. And I was like, oh God, I was like, this needs to change. But from there, I got the HL15 chassis where I put a gigabyte ME03 motherboard in it. I had seen a 64 core 128 thread CPU. I was like, okay, we're planning on throwing that out. Let me put that in there. And mind you, this Proxmox server was built terribly because this was like my first month here, knew nothing. I was like, yeah, let's do all spinners for a virtualization system. Oh gosh. Yeah. Raid Z1. So like very little redundancy. And I was like, I'm just going to blow this whole thing out and start over. But long story short. Yeah. HL15, that just goes to show the modularity of it because you can put just any motherboard in there. Like, but if you need something that's a little bit bigger, like if you want to do EATX or if you want to put like a 5090 in there, good luck affording or finding one nowadays. Right yeah the funny enough we have one here that i use for home lab videos and the amount of times i'm like What excuse can I use to take this home and say I'm testing it out and then not return it? But the, yeah, it's great for a full-size GPU. HL15 Beast also has eight dedicated SSD slots where the HL15 has just those 15 HDD bays, or sorry, storage bays. You can put SSDs in them. And then we also have the X15, of course, our newest release, which if you're somebody who is big into unraid it comes with a lifetime license it's very similar to our x15 or sorry hl15 but we've worked with lime technologies the creators of unraid very closely the hardware is a little bit different still has ipmi because they all have either gigabyte or ASRock Rack boards in them so you still get that functionality which is great and then Oh, also with the HL15B, you have a choice of a ProArt X870E motherboard or, again, an ROM ASRAC motherboard. So if you want to go more server or more prosumer sort of deal there. So you have a lot of options. Or, and I know I'm kind of going on a long-winded thing here.

Eric: No, I love it.

Guest: Yeah. Something like this, when I'm passionate about it, I kind of just go off on a tangent. But the other thing that's great is you don't like the hardware that's in it. That's fine. People have their use cases and everything. You can buy a system that is just the backplane, a system that is the backplane, the power supply, or you can buy a fully built-in, burnt-in system. So there's lots of options there, especially if you have some RAM at your house. You have a motherboard. You don't want to you know take out a second mortgage trying to afford them again you have that option you just put the guts in there

Eric: And and that's something i really wanted to call out was that that 45 home lab offers those three tiers on each of their products it's really nice because you can either get just the bare bones, or you can kind of get things pre-assembled or you can get the full white glove you know everything's already been, everything's already been run for a bit it's been stress tested you know just that real real, that real great just drop it on my doorstep i plug in my drives and i go because everything's already ready to go.

Guest: Yeah exactly and the you have your choice of os of course we can ship it with windows no os pop os but it's freely open modular whatever you want to do oh and also ships with a i believe it's a it's a 500 gig big NVMe on the HL15 and the Beast, and it is a one terabyte on the X15. So you do have that internal storage on those full builds as well.

Eric: Nice. So tell me a little bit about some use cases here. You just said you went through a big upgrade at home. What workloads do you have running on top of it?

Guest: So it's definitely overkill for what I currently have running on it, because right now it's just a couple of containers. I've been so lazy doing anything from home because I've been so busy at work that it's like I get home and I'm like, Yeah. Server's not on fire. It can wait. So right now it's just very small. It's ad guard for DNS. It's a proxmox overall, but, and this time it's actually SSDs and raid 10. So it's a little bit speedier this time. My latency isn't like 300%, But yeah, the, that's kind of the small little things, ad guard, a small little bit of plex. And as of right now, It's more a dev machine than anything. So I still do a lot of things in the solution specialist. So configuration, troubleshooting, whatnot. And on the enterprise side, our customers, once they get the system, it's not like you're locked into a certain environment or anything. So they'll reach out and be like, hey, I'm trying to do this on my system. Can you help out? And it's like, I've never heard of that in my life, but yes, I can. Let me just go and try to lab this up real quick. So that's what I kind of do in my home server a lot. now mind you it's going to get more robust as i get the time and the motivation to actually go and do it but for use cases there i say proxmox is a big one For any of the systems really like plex is big frigate that's one thing i actually did have running previously but then one of my died and i was like well blow the whole thing out start again so i had the what is it now the a coral TPU, I believe it was that I was passing through right to a VM that was able to run frigate and everything on that HL 15, which was great for that motion detection and all of that. What else did I have? Oh, local AI system. I actually just did a video recently on PewDiePie's AI Odysseus, which surprisingly, like I know next to nothing about like the underneath of AI or anything. I was coming at it from completely layman's. It's like, I use Claude, I use chat GPT. And, but there's some cool stuff in it, like cookbook and stuff like that, that it selects your model based on the hardware that would best be suited for you and things like that. But yeah, I see a lot of people using them for local AI. We actually had somebody reach out the other day. They wanted to know if we had anything that could fit 12 full length GPUs in it.

Eric: Oh gosh.

Guest: Yeah. I was like, unfortunately we don't because that's just, that's getting like above enterprise at that point. That's a custom build right there.

Eric: Right. Yeah, for sure. That's awesome because I mentioned I'm running Proxmox here at home. It used to be Unraid, but I'm trying to move more to an infrastructure as code type of a workflow. And Unraid was great for containers. It was great set it and forget it. So Unraid was running on the R720. And then I had three R730s that were going to run an OpenShift cluster. I was working for Red Hat at the time, and so OpenShift is their opinionated Kubernetes build. We'll never buy enterprise-grade hardware ever again. Don't do it. But consumer and prosumer stuff works great. But let's see. So you can actually see just how sad my home lab has become over the last few years, because I sold off a few of my UniFi routers and switches. I sold off the R730s and consolidated everything down to the R720 and switched from Unraid to Proxmox. And so now it's running a series of virtual machines that you can tell that I just kind of gave up on my migration plan. Because there's a huge backup folder where some of my apps are still just sitting there waiting to be deployed. But then over the last two years, it's been running RHEL, Fedora, AlmaLinux, and RockyLinux. So you can tell how old the workflow is based on my LinkedIn job history. And so what I've actually been doing for the last month or so is I've been, I've installed Forgejo with some runners, which if you're unfamiliar with Forgejo, it's think of it as kind of like a GitHub that's self-hosted. It's got the Git repositories, the wiki, the issue tracking, but also you can spin up runners. It's got a container registry. So all that's built in. And so I'm actually running Fedora server bootc. So think about that AB operating system upgrade path where the operating system is semi-immutable. We'll have to cover bootc on this show at some point. So it's very much more container-driven. It's much more CI pipeline-driven. So basically, I'm moving all of my stuff over to that so that any changes to my infrastructure will now just be a YAML configuration change and a Git push, and then everything just shows up in my infrastructure.

Guest: Excellent.

Eric: So my goal is to, around the time that's completed, to do, a hardware migration, that way I can just redeploy all of my bootc images, redeploy all my Podman containers, which cover, I've got Plex, I've got Minecraft, I've got Minecraft Bedrock. Calibre Library for eBooks. I've got Valheim. Goodness, what else am I running out there? Oh, my website. My website actually just migrated from WordPress to static HTML using Hugo. So I've got some really nice projects on it. And once the operating systems, the infrastructure, all that kind of stuff is taken care of, the hardware is kind of the next priority. So I've got the R720. I've got the co-located data center. And I've got the apartment. And let's see, storage-wise, I've got a pair of 256-gig SSDs for the operating system. I've got two 2-terabyte SSDs for virtual machine storage. And then I've got three WD Red Pro 18-terabyte spinning disks for backups and Plex media. And so I'll probably keep a lot of that intact because I'm doing decent on the storage front. I may add a fourth 18-terabyte hard drive, but I'm not really sure on that. I think the. Underlying server hardware is what needs to be replaced first. So I've kind of shared a little bit about what I'm running. And like you, I work in the infrastructure space. So lots of virtual machines, spinning up, tearing down, doing horrible things to virtual machines before you delete them. And then you just spin up new ones that have no memory of all the things that, you did at 2 o'clock in the morning when you're like, it should work.

Guest: Why won't you work?

Eric: So keeping in mind that I want to bring things in-house, That I'm wanting to grow my, I mean, the number of virtual machines I have will probably double in the next 12 months as I look at other things like, do I de-Google-ify my life again? Do I go to Nextcloud? So storage and performance, I would like to run a local AI. And that can either be on the same hardware or, you know, this home lab device could just be storage. There's so many things to think through. So if if i were to to drop this project on your plate what uh what type of hardware would you recommend.

Guest: Listen i'm i've seen your podcast you work hard i'm saying treat yourself to an hl15 beast fully loaded with a 50 90 512 gigs of ddr5 no the uh one question i do have what kind of cpu and ram or i guess how many cores and threads do you currently have and your memory at this time Well,

Eric: I did my homework because I assumed you were going to ask. So right now I am running 16 virtual machines and I have 116 gigs of RAM on. Provision for those virtual machines. Actual usage is probably a little bit lower. So about 116 gigs of RAM, figure running Proxmox underneath, maybe another eight gigs for the operating system, I think is their recommendation, for kind of the higher end usage. So we're looking at 124 gigs of RAM. I'm considering all the projects that I'm considering, and especially as I start a new job or wherever I end up, I'll probably be doing more infrastructure, more testing. I prefer to do demos off my own machine. I'm conservatively guessing that that could double in the next year. So we're looking at about 250 gigs of RAM, 16 virtual machines. That'll probably double, even though those may not all be live at the same time. Most of my virtual machines are running four cores each. So if you want to get out your calculator, your abacus and start.

Guest: Oh, yeah.

Eric: Yeah.

Guest: I'm way ahead of you.

Eric: There's a few exceptions to that. Most of my virtual machines are running four cores, but there's a few exceptions like Plex is running, I think, eight cores. The Forgejo runners, I've got a pair of those. They're running eight cores as well. So, you know, that number could easily double in the next year as well.

Guest: Okay. Let me see here so based on that so just the fact that it has 124 currently and the so that takes out everything below the hl15 so i would say hl15 is good to start with and from there let me see here where are my notes there we go uh so the hl15 comes with the ASRock ROMED8-2T motherboard. So with that, we have a few AMD EPYC's that you can plug into it. Probably go to the higher end with that, just to kind of have a little bit of a buffer, which would be the EPYC 7452. And I believe that is 32 core, 64 threads. And so that would be right about the upper limits of where you're currently, where you want to be with everything or where you're currently at. So maybe even if you want to go past that different cpu that maybe we don't offer or even just doing the bare bones just the backplane power supply and then sourcing or harvesting from what you currently have if it does have any upgrade options so there are a few paths there and then of course you do have those 15 bays of storage for hds or ssds and that board does take 128 gigs there but I do believe I've tested it with 256 mind you RAM is I'm sure you know one of those things that's so finicky that it's like yeah and the motherboard and CPU of course that it's like oh it's rated for this but oh I put crucial in it that works fine but oh then I put Samsung in it it doesn't but it's the exact same thing anyways

Eric: Right yeah and and hundreds of people across my audience are all nodding along to this because we've all felt that pain.

Guest: Oh yeah and then it also comes with that 9400-16i hba so you're not being bottlenecked by anything there and it's that direct wired backplane as well so they're all able to take full all able to take fully advantage of that of that hba of the power of those drives and everything

Eric: That's yeah i was afraid that's what you're going to suggest.

Guest: Yeah yeah i was like depending on what he has like If I hear anything over 100 gig, it's like, okay, we're going HL15 right there. And then if, of course, if you want to go higher than that, like if an EATX motherboard or anything like a full length GPU, then you're getting into the HL15 piece territory.

Eric: Yes, sir. So my biggest concern with going that big is the noise factor.

Guest: So for that now, and I have this written down. So with the regular fans that we have in it it is so one foot away is 42 to 44 decibels 33 or sorry three feet away is 33 to 35 and those are Dynatron pwm fans but we also have an upgrade kit for full noctua which knocks that down considerably i don't have the exact numbers there but we know Noctua, we know how quiet they are really at that point there. Well, I have an HL 15 running at home and I have one running at the office as well. So for when I'm doing testing. My colleague that I mentioned that I start at the same time here with love the guy but if there is something that is like repetitively noisy and I'm the same way it'd be like can you please turn that off but it is it's whisper quiet like there's some days that I have to like double check if the light wasn't on I'd have to be like okay is this actually running like what's going on but yeah it is there's one in my home right now this might not be a practical testing but we do have a cat that is literally scared of any noise and i've rebooted that system and they've been a foot or two away perfectly fine that's just personal experience but it is it is very very quiet

Eric: Gotcha that's good to know and so one of the things i was thinking about was i've got unified gear at home and most of it's fanless and so i was thinking about moving my networking gear out of the coat closet that's, right right next to me right on the other side of this wall yeah and putting it into one of the one of the the one of the server racks that you all sell as well yeah do those provide any kind of noise canceling as well.

Guest: They don't of the ones we have i've actually one of was looking at sourcing a noise canceling one myself they do do a good job of it but not like the dedicated noise canceling ones because my God, those, the price jump in those that I've seen just looking them up, it was like, oh, if we have one SysRack that is, it's 24U, you look for the equivalent, it's like a $2,000 difference. It's like, you're just putting like foam around it. And it's like, I'm sure there's a lot more engineering that goes into it than that. But my little pea brain is like, it's just foam.

Eric: Right. Okay. All right. So now does that purchase come with a shirt?

Guest: It can be actually funny enough. This one is so old. I don't think they even make this one anymore. It's not even the same logo that we have or anything, but no, we often do have like shirts, things like that on our website, bottle openers. And sometimes we have like, eh, get a freebie, something like that. Like something to toss in there. But one thing I wanted to ask, So your networking, I've asked this to do a few guests because every time we've had somebody on ours, they always have UnifyGear and I keep waiting to pull the trigger on it because right now mine is still just a, it's a managed switch, but it's like a Netgear managed switch that was like a hundred bucks or something like five years ago. Not great, but what kind of, do you have like the, the UDM Unify or yeah.

Eric: So that's something else I'm thinking about, too. But I think the server needs, to change before my networking gear. Because right now, my setup's pretty great. I've got a UDM Pro, and that takes care of routing, firewall, DNS, DHCP. It's got a spinning drive in it for UniFi security cameras that I had mounted on the outside of my house. I don't have those security cameras anymore. And then I've got the US XG6 that is a PoE switch. So I had two or three access points in the house and then the two security cameras that ran off the XG6. And then desktop side, I have a USW Flex Mini. It's like a four-port gigabit desktop switch that's also PoE. And then I just upgraded these a couple of months ago. Didn't need to, but just did. I've got the U7 Pro XGs and I've got two of them inside of my 1300 square foot apartment. Probably a little overkill, but I like redundancy. I'm a systems administrator. So one goes down. I still have the other.

Guest: Yeah, exactly.

Eric: The, you're asking about the, the net gear and I'm kind of torn and I'd love to hear the audience's feedback on this as well, because with as simple as my home lab has become. The XG6 is probably overkill because one of my APs uses a power injector. So it's plugged into the wall for Ethernet, it's plugged into the wall for power, and then just run one Ethernet cord up to the ceiling. The other one is still powered off the PoE switch. So I literally have a switch here that is powering one router, and that's just not needed. The UDM Pro is really great. I love it. Everything's unified, if you'll forgive the pun. One single interface. It's great to manage my networking with. And I'm not a networking guy. I don't want to fight with the network. I just want it to work. So it works really well for that. But then, and this is why I want to circle back to your Netgear switch, is I'm actually considering maybe a MikroTik, or MikroTik, depending on how you want to say it. Because in my colo, I'm actually running OPNsense. So something like MikroTik RouterOS or OPNsense might just be a way to go that would just put further production limitations on a server. It couldn't go down because that would, that runs everything. That runs the Wi-Fi, that runs the home lab, that runs Plex, that runs then also DHCP, DNS, just kind of that normal day-to-day stuff where my daughter and her tablet, you know, that on-call factor goes up a little bit. So I'm kind of torn on that front as well.

Guest: Mm-hmm. I do hear good things about the, I might be mispronouncing it, but the Omada switches that have come out recently.

Eric: I'm not familiar.

Guest: Yeah, it's, I'm going to get flamed for this, but I believe it's a division of Netgear. I might be wrong on that, but it's pretty much like a, as far as I've seen, it's a similar to the Unify stuff, but a bit cheaper. Apparently the, it's not as the GUI isn't as fleshed out as Unify's is. And just the fact that you said, I'm not a network guy. I just want to work in everything. That's kind of my whole thing between, so not a network guy either, but I want to learn as much as I can about networking. Cause when it comes to learning something, my biggest difficulty is when it comes to something that I can't physically see, and I can see the network cables themselves, the ports, but when you come to those abstraction layers where you start going into your, your mush up there so i'm like okay if i can get something that has an easy to use gui from the get-go and then kind of evolve from there to something like OPNsense or MikroTik which i've heard that the amount of features the amount of power that you get with the i believe it was the MikroTik stuff that it's night and day compared to udm to unify but i was like maybe for somebody who's like wants to get a better grasp on networking maybe i'll start at the gui stuff first. Plus their hardware just looks so nice.

Eric: Their hardware looks amazing and it runs fantastic. I've, I've been a Unify shop for 15 plus years and I've not bought anything network that wasn't Unify. I love their stuff. And if you want a GUI-first experience, because that's the problem with some of the Dell smart switches or you get into some crazy stuff like Cisco, it was command line first. But if you want a GUI, hands-on visual experience, Unify has one of the most beautiful web interfaces that I've ever seen. And they've recently changed a lot of it. So the past year or so, the interface has changed a lot, but that won't impact you. Things that I used to know where it was is now somewhere else, so I have to use the in-app search function a little bit to say, I'm looking for port forwarding. Where did you hide that now? But it's intuitive, it's easy to use, and as someone who just need basic network functionality, well, basic as far as being a prosumer or a home labber, UniFi is great. It's a little bit on the expensive side. that's why i tend to classify it as kind of a prosumer grade but i mean it's it's fantastic.

Guest: Yeah the every time i connect with one of our customers because a lot of them in the enterprise do use these unify switches and everything and i'm like oh this is so nice to like navigate through and manage and then here i am with my little hundred dollar netgear managed switch where it's just like i use this so it's essentially a dummy switch at this point because i haven't done anything with it so it's just 16 ports of one gig which is funny too because my home lab is it has so the hl15 and the x15 and the beast they all come with 10 gig dual 10 gig onboards and then i also because the proxmox server i was like we have two 10 gig nix dual 10 gig nix here so i really have six 10 gig ports all together and it's just going to a one gig switch it's not really doing much past that because now it's just a dev environment so i'm like Oh, man, what am I going to do with this now?

Eric: Yeah, probably time to upgrade that switch, my friend.

Guest: Yeah, I think so.

Eric: So as we're kind of coming to the end of the show, I always ask this of my guests. Is there a topic or is there something that you wanted to cover that we haven't covered on the show thus far?

Guest: Oh, let me see. Nothing that I can think of. Actually, I do have a question for you. So somebody who is a self-hoster, I kind of am trying to get into asking this question to anybody who's in that homelab space. What is something that either you regret self-hosting or you absolutely refuse to self-host?

Eric: Oh, that's a good one. That's a good question. So one thing I refuse to self-host is email.

Guest: Bingo.

Eric: Good answer. Email is probably the one thing that I will never, ever bring in. The reputation system that email servers share, the amount of spam that comes in, it's just a nightmare. And if one bad email gets flagged or something, then all of a sudden you're off of everybody's trusted list. And so things like bills and attorney emails and all this stuff that you depend on for life just stop coming in. And it's like, I haven't gotten any emails for three days. That's really weird. Oh, great. Now I got to stay up all night and try and clean up this reputation. So, oh, thank you.

Guest: Yeah and funny enough when i got into home labbing and everything reason i bring that up is one of the first things that i actually was like oh what should i try to self-host this must have been a trolling comment on reddit i was just looking at some past ones they were like oh you should try an email server and then i did not look any further into it and i was like yeah sure i'll do that and then it was like i think i spent eight to twelve hours like just non-stop because i am bad for when I get into something I am locked into it yeah it's it's bad and then it'll be 12 hours later I'm like oh I did not get up from my chair did not have a drink of water I feel like death now and yeah it did not work out and then I've never looked at it since and then we'll never do it again

Eric: Yeah yeah email is a good one to stay away from but there's so many things that, Actually, there was a question I skipped over, but so, on that front, if you are looking to buy one of these 45HomeLab devices, if you've got a HomeLab that you're looking to get more use out of, I'd actually direct you to the 45HomeLab webpage because one of the cool things on there is they do staff picks. Zack, you want to tell the audience a little bit about staff picks?

Guest: Yeah. So that's actually going through a bit of a revamp right now too, because there's so many projects. Like when we first started it, we took some of the like ones that a lot of people here use. So the classics, image, Plex, Jellyfin, Frigate. And now since myself and my friend behind the camera, Joe, we've been doing the Homelab channel. We've been like, okay, there's a lot of projects, especially there's so many cool things with Proxmox coming out that essentially it's going to be. Things that I've covered on the channel and that I personally use in my home lab or other people here use day-to-day in their home lab so things like image plaques that'll all be there but then there'll be things like ProxCenterUI which I'm doing a video on recently or coming up soon let's see what else ProxMenux like there's a lot of prox mock stuff that I've been delving into But yeah things like that that are just like earlier linked to the video or I also have a side website i've been working on that's still part of 45 home lab called docs.45HomeLab.com that if there is a video that i do that has an instruction a feature set in it like that it'll run through that entire thing in there because some people are fine with the video some people like myself if somebody like techno tim puts out a video i'm always going to his website to look at the guide that he's put out with it because that's how i'm best at deploying these kind of things so yeah you You can go to docs.45HomeLab for that or store.45HomeLab.com for everything that we have on offer there.

Eric: Awesome. Well, that is Zack Perry from 45HomeLab. Really appreciate you joining me. Really was looking forward to this episode. And I get to pick your brain about my own future investments.

Guest: Yeah. And yeah, really appreciate you having me on. I really hope I get to speak to you a little bit more in the future there. Are you going to Texas Linux Fest this year?

Eric: I am booked to speak at Texas Linux Fest. And as long as the job situation lines up, then I will definitely be there. So if you're curious, that is in Austin, Texas, the first week of November. So go check out Texas Linux Fest. And then there's a few others I'm hoping to make, like All Things Open springs to mind. I think that's kind of it for 2026, unless, at least off the top of my head, there may be some others. We'll see how the rest of the year plays out.

Guest: Yeah, I actually might be going to the Texas Linux Fest. So if I do, I'll definitely be hitting you up there.

Eric: Awesome, yeah. So definitely go check out 45HomeLab. They've got tons of guides, picks, and of course, they're beautiful hardware. Seriously, you got to go check this stuff out. Some of the blues and some of the oranges, just absolutely gorgeous hardware. Makes me kind of excited that I don't have a server rack in a basement that I can show some of this gear off when I get it purchased. But that brings us to the end of today's episode, but tune in here in two weeks. I don't know exactly who the guest is going to be. I've got about four or five episode guides out under review right now, so it may just be more of my home lab journey, or we may have a completely different topic. We'll just see kind of who goes through the revision process first on episode guides, so definitely tune in in two weeks. And in case you haven't already, make sure you subscribe. Hit that subscribe and the bell icon. That way you get notified anytime we produce new content. I've actually been working on growing the channel this summer, so hoping to put out some new tutorials, maybe some videos around my bootc migration here when that project wraps. So definitely a lot of content coming your way. Meantime, check out the Fedora podcast. We just put out an episode last week, and we've got another one scheduled for next week. So if you're interested in the Fedora Project, go check out the Fedora Podcast where Noah Chelliah from the Ask Noah Show and myself are hosts. And Zack, anywhere else you want to send folks?

Guest: Uh, no, that's about it there, but I will say not usually a big podcast guy or anything like that. Watch it, listening to them or anything like that. I listened to your one with Mathias and just talking about bootc and everything, something I looked at that very cursory glance. I was like, this is a rabbit hole. I'm not getting into right now, but I listened to that thing. Like it had me on the hook while I was actually doing like my documentation for this podcast here. And yeah as Eric said there if you're not subscribed subscribe to him it's very good podcast I'm actually going to be checking out some more episodes after this

Eric: Awesome well thank you so much I appreciate that and yeah Mathias and I got in pretty deep on bootc and home labbing and, he definitely gave me some ideas like he works for a company called Victoria Metrics so I might be using them to track logs and performance across all of these new virtual machine servers instead of just guessing whether they're up or not. So definitely check out the previous episodes of this show. It's kind of been an arc this year about how do I cut down on the number of subscriptions and how do I get more bang for my buck out of the home lab. Because while hardware has become incredibly expensive, so has every single subscription that we all have. So definitely check out the back catalog of this show. Thank you, Zack. Maybe I'll cut that out as a short.

Guest: Yeah, for sure.

Eric: All right, everyone. On behalf of Zack Perry, my guest for today, I'm Eric the IT Guy Hendricks. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you again real soon.

Guest: See you now. Have a good one.