I have a menagerie of tech at home.

Connectivity

ISP

Andrews & Arnold, who else? Not the cheapest, but a very high quality service. I have an embarrassing number of routable IPv4 addresses.

Heracles

The router. A GL-iNet Brume running a self built flavour of OpenWRT. My Wireguard endpoint for any VPN shenanigans. It got it’s name as it replaced my previous router that was called Cerberus.

Gru, Bob, Dave, Kevin, Stuart

A collection of GL-iNet Velica They were on offer on Amazon (I think £60 a pair) so I put OpenWRT on them and set up a mesh WiFi for the house. 5 is probably overkill. I run 4 separate SSIDs as VLANs to separate out House, Guest, Work and IOT with various rules as to who can talk to what. Alfred sits on both the wired network and the IOT one to act as a bridge. They have Bluetooth as well so one day I’ll investigate using them as a BLE to MQTT gateway instead of the couple of ESP32 I have filling that duty.

Servers

Luggage

Luggage is a Synology DS918+(pdf) NAS with 2 4Tb disks and some extra RAM. ~~ It is serving the bytes you are reading now.~~ I bought it about 5 years ago and it just sits quietly in the corner serving files as needed. I ran some extra services on it previously, but now it’s all about the files (and a few web requests). Named after Rincewind’s case.

Alfred

The house butler. Runs Home Assistant as an exercise in using docker compose. Alfred is a no-name fanless PC bought from Amazon with a 2Ghz Celeron and 16Gb RAM. /etc/debian_version says ‘bookworm/sid’

Nith

Anagram of Naming Things Is Hard. An old Mac Mini I got from someone at work. I don’t know the vintage but it has a 2Ghz i7, 8Gb RAM and a small SSD (100Gb). Another Debian box, this time claiming to be ‘11.7’ This runs Jellyfin and Immich, and for both serves files from NFS shares on luggage. Consumes 40W at idle so I’m tempted to switch the workload onto Alfred and bin it. Or replace them both with something running an N100 or N200

Blog

I was serving this from Luggage, but it wouldn’t give me any logs to have fun like watching access attempts to Wordpress files getting 301’d to a 1TB test file. I rummaged through a drawer and found a Raspberry Pi 3B+, which I called blog and is now sending you these bytes.

Personal Computers

Gedge

Since the 90’s, my main computer has always been called Gedge This incarnation of it is a 3.6GHz i9 with 32Gb RAM, some SSD, a AMD RX5something video card and runs Pop!_OS. It’s my general donkey machine and occasional games. I’ve got a nice 4K LG monitor that was paid for by being on call over Christmas & New Year a couple of years ago.

Bernard

A 2019 era Dell XPS13. My previous laptop was called Nursie, so this one has Nursie’s true name. The 13" 4K screen made Grub an interesting experience until I figured out how to change the fonts. Another Pop!_Os machine that I use to noodle with code on the sofa, take on holiday and waste too much time on Mastodon with.