When we last left off I had built my own router and upgraded the network adapter card for it. All seemed to be going well, but the Zimaboard was a little under-powered. I started doing some research (always a red flag) and started hearing about Intel N100 systems. Here was a $100ish system that I could install a NvME drive and my own RAM in. Of course, I ordered one.
The conversion of my config from the Zimaboard to the N100 was painless. Still running OPNsense, still using that for DHCP, Nginx and DDNS. The only thing that required some tinkering was some DDNS entries over to my registrar. For those that don’t mess with networks much, my public IP address can change from my ISP. My entries for sites (like this one) and others would need to be manually updated if this happens. I’d rather let my router take care of that automatically, which I had, but the token from my registrar doesn’t come over in the config, so I needed to recreate it and apply it to the update jobs. I also allow my registrar to proxy my addresses, so what you see when you try to resolve it, is not the actual IP address my ISP has assigned me. Security through obscurity.
Around this same time, I had been looking to upgrade my gaming desktop. I decided I would go with off-the-shelf this go round (last one was self-built). I usually give the old one to my kids, but my daughter had no desire for a desktop and my son already had a gaming rig from last Christmas. Then I got the bright idea to use the system as a virtual host and stand up some virtual machines to tinker with and host various apps (that were currently on a Pi or the older Zimaboard).
I decided on Proxmox. I ordered a cheap SSD to house the operating system and installed some 2 NvME drives I had from previous systems. I was ready to tackle virtualization and even a NAS?
…More to come.
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