I’m curious to know more about your setup! Which switches do you prefer? What hardware are you using for proxmox? And what does your network look like?
For the switches I'm considering replacing them all with 2.5gbit but don't see the need to yet. Currently I have a TL-SG1016DE as the core switch. The main proxmox servers are 3 used Dell 1U servers I bought from Ebay. Each has 256GB ECC ram, 2x 8 core CPUs, 4x Gbit intel nics. I flashed the PERC card to be a plain SCSI controller so ZFS in Proxmox has direct access to the disks. If I were to buy them today I'd look for R720's or newer. I got mine for about $800 USD each. They're overkill, but provide a lot of capacity. They're also unnecessary, you can ignore them and only consider the rest of this comment. They're the most expensive, hottest, and loudest devices on the network.
I have a separate tower that's a old 9th gen intel that provides the large ~50TB ZFS NFS server. It used to be an intel Atom, but that finally died after 10 years so I moved the drives to a gaming PC I had lying around. Over the years, nicest thing about ZFS and Proxmox is the drives are fully independent of the hardware and the software OS they're attached to. Now, I just pass the devices through Proxmox to a Debian VM and they come up just like they did before.
Regarding the rest of the network, let's move from the edge in toward the 3x 1U servers and NFS storage box. I have 1gig symmetric fiber from Ziply. The ONT has cat5 running to 1 of the 4 gig ports in an Intel Atom C2758. The other 3 ports are bridged together in Proxmox to act as a switch. It kind of looks like an EdgeRouter-4 if you squint at the ports. This C2758 only runs a single VM, OpenWRT. The nice thing is I can take snapshots before upgrades, and upgrade or replace the hardware easily.
The OpenWRT VM is the most critical thing in the whole network. I try to manage it simply, I have some shell scripts that copy the /etc/config files into place and restart services for a simple IaC setup.
The main services OpenWRT provides are:
1. WAN DHCP client, my ISP doesn't offer static IPs.
2. One minute cron job that makes sure the A record for home.example.com is correct. *.home.example.com is a CNAME to home.example.com, this simplifies configuration and TLS cert management.
3. HAProxy runs on OpenWRT listening on 0.0.0.0:80 and 0.0.0.0:443 Extremely valuable for SNI routing of TLS connections. I moved the LuCI web UI to alternate ports, which is simple to do via config.
4. dnsmasq provides dhcp and dns for the main and guest VLANs.
5. OpenWRT is configured as a WireGuard server. Each wireguard client device is allocated an dedicated IP in a separate 192.168.x/24 subnet. This has been great for source based IP access control which I'll cover below. Wireguard clients connect to home.example.com.
That's it for OpenWRT. The key lesson I learned is it's been incredibly valuable to run haproxy on OpenWRT. All L4 connections terminate to it, but crucially it does not handle TLS certificates. It only forwards TCP connections based on the SNI in the client hello. HAProxy is also configured to use the PROXY protocol to preserve source IP addresses, which has been great for access control.
Most TLS connections are forwarded to a single node Talos VM running on another Proxmox host. This VM runs Cilium, Istio, and the Gateway API. The istio envoy gateway is configured to accepts PROXY protocol connections, which means AuthorizationPolicy resources work as expected. By default, only connections coming from the local subnets, or the wireguard subnet are allowed. OpenWRT does hairpin NAT, so this works just fine, all sources connect to the WAN IP regardless if they're internal or external.
I don't do much with Kube yet, most of the traffic is forwarded on to another VM running Portainer. Most of my backend services are in Portainer. The Kube VM does handle Certificate and AuthorizationPolicy resources though, using cert-manager and Istio. This has been nice, I don't need to configure each service for TLS or access control in bespoke way, it's all in one place.
The only other thing to note is the Dell 1U servers have 3 of their 4 gig nics aggregated into LACP bonds. Similar to the Atom router, they're configured as a bridge in Proxmox and I use them for the Ceph data plane. 9 of the 16 ports in that TL-SG1016DE are just for Ceph and I'm able to get close to 600 MiB/sec reads (yes megabytes) which is pretty neat given 1gbit interfaces.
That's about it. Overall I'm trying to eliminate VLAN's, but it still makes sense to have them for Ceph and for a Guest wifi network.
Edit: Lastly I've maintained a home lab for 25 years and this is the best iteration yet. All of the trade-offs feel "right" to me.
What effect, if any, did you notice on sensor outputs from heat generated by other system components? e.g., constant temperature offset after reaching thermal steady state
We have not tested this properly (see my other comment on lab testing), but so far we have observed no effect during normal operation and only saw a slight increase when charging the device (~1°). We took great care to move the sensors far away from power management. Luckily, the display cutout also helps here.
Don’t look to large, well-known registrars. I would suggest that you look for local registrars in your area. The TLD registry for your country/area usually has a list of the authorized registrars, so you can simply search that for entities with a local address.
Disclaimer: I work at such a small registrar, but you are probably not in our target market.
I miss the days when Network Solutions had a permanent option to switch/sign-up with a PGP key, binding all future communications and change requests to it.
I forget how they handled key expiration/revocation...
Since you asked, I use Cloudflare for my registrar. I can’t really say if it’s objectively better or worse than anybody else, but they seemed like a good choice when Google was in the process of shutting off their registry service.
I use Cloudflare for everything I can and then currently use Namecheap for anything it doesn't support. I haven't tried Porkbun mostly because I'm okay with what I have already.
After Google ditched Domains I moved to Route53. I guess the only downside is that it doesn't handle some TLDs?
What you want from a registrar is to keep existing for many years and resilience to social engineering, and AWS seems like the next best thing to Google which you famously can't even talk to for a social engineering attempt. I expect AWS account management to be almost as good as Gaia, but don't really know how hard social engineering is.
I recently had to bail on Gandi. I had a special requirement, being Canadian, in that I didn't want to use a registrar in the USA. I found a Canadian registrar that seemed to have the technical stuff reasonably worked out (many don't) and had easy to understand pricing:
Not sure, I use dnsimple for dns and wrote my own little service to update my A record, no ip6 in my corner of the world so have not checked for AAAA record support.
CF sells domains at cost so you're not going to beat them on price, but the catch is that domains registered through them are locked to their infrastructure, you're not allowed to change the nameservers. They're fine if you don't need that flexibility and they support the TLDs you want.
Not really; it was a gimmick. They used standard forecast post-processing techniques to bias correct global/regional weather models. There is virtually no evidence they actually used device data in this process.
Cheers!