Desknet Revisited
I moved, I added, I changed.
Having recently relocated, I now have a much better situation. No more mold. Carpet gone, laminate floors. Best of all I have two tables, back to back, just five feet apart. All I have to do is push back and turn to get from one environment to the other.
So Desknet got some significant changes …
Attention Conservation Notice:
New location, new network, new network map. This only matters if you’re going to build a home lab for yourself.
Physical Layout:
My desk now just has my MacBook Pro (Brain) the 27” Samsung 4k display, and a light. There’s no room for anything else and it’s tucked into a corner with the bed right next to it. Snug, but comfortable.
The table behind me has the 32” curvedt Samsung display that gives me claustrophobia with the four port KVM next to it. The cramped monitor is offset by having space on either side of the table to spread out and do stuff.
This is amazingly freeing. Here’s what’s attached to the KVM
Titan - Win11/Qubes one liter PC.
Pi7 Raspberry Pi5 with ethernet dongle to tap network.
Ratty Orange Pi 3 Zero for which I have buyer’s regret.
Proxmox machine or MacAir(Pinky) as needed.
I have been really frustrated with MikroTik gear, but more than half of that was the gymnastics required to get at my wall ethernet jack, and much of the rest was was the poor seating and contortions required to get at various network devices.
Renewed Purpose:
The initial goal with this setup was to be able to do the hardware/OS side of supporting Hexnode. I wanted one of everything within easy reach, got there, but then the use case for Hexnode evaporated. It’s astonishingly hard to get small groups to run securely, even when there’s enough formal organization to drive it. I’m done trying to coax others to do this. Assuming the portion of the economy on which I depend does not implode AGAIN for the second time in a year, I am just going to pay the $59/month out of pocket so I can complete the training.
Having the Pi 5 with two ethernet ports for the sake of traffic capture on the MikroTik RB941 is a very old friend for me. I’ve been tapping LANs for the sake of tuning since Network General Sniffer days. The one liter HP is the most potent machine over there, but I really want my solution to be portable. The Pi5 is running with an NVMe drive in a large metal case with sharp corners. Once I’m sure this does what I need, I’ve got a nice rounded aluminum heat sink style case, but I’ll be giving up the NVMe for a smaller, slower microSD card. That’s fine if the machine is just going out for network tap duties.
Another significant change here is Freedom From Parallels. This expensive, finicky, NOT UPGRADEABLE hypervisor has given way to VMware Fusion, which is now free. There is a VirtualBox installer for Apple Silicon, but I found it to be completely dysfunctional. Fusion just starts and runs and has grownup network options, unlike the Parallels crippleware.
Futures:
The Proxmox machine had little to do at the old house other than hosting a large drive for archive duties. Now it’s been dusted off and it’s got one large VM running Docker. I ran out of steam with Dify.ai, now I’m going to get started with ArangoDB’s LLM+ Knowledge Graph. I know I can be immediately productive with ArangoDB, it’s an old friend from Twitter API streaming days.
I hit what I’m sure were trivial snags with Dify, but the people who make videos for it are kids a third my age with thick accents who presume they’re addressing other long time users. When I spend half an hour looking for some setting that none of ChatGPT, Google, or YouTube can explain that gets old really fast. And the finally death blow - there was no GraphRAG support last I looked.
The best performing machine in the pack is the little HP EliteDesk, it’s got 70% of the power of the Z420 I parked a few months ago and it’s one tenth the size and weight. They’re limited to just 64GB and no GPU, but tiny and quiet are king/queen in this space. The gargantuan Xeon HP workstations I used to favor are giving way to the smallest machines they build. I’m not gonna get the scale and check, but I think all of the systems I’m using now put together weigh less than the Z420 sitting in the corner awaiting disposal.
Conclusion:
I did not realize how badly the black mold in the old place had been weighing me down. I’ve got my focus back, I can set up a string of tasks … and then knock them down.