Tiernan's Comms Closet

Geek, Programmer, Photographer, network egineer…

Monthly Archives January 2023

Day 28 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 28 of #100daysofhomelab and I got some benchmarks for the WordPress site. First, using ab, going directly to WordPress. It does have W3 Total Cache turned on, using Redis for DB and Object Cache, etc. 10000 requests at 100 a go, 682 requests a second, and meantime of 146ms per request. Total bandwidth is around 50Mbit/s.

CPU usage while running this is somewhat pegged around the 100% mark.

Next, we run the same but this time direct to Varnish. It is caching the requests and not hitting the Nginx box. We are now at 1899 requests per second (2.7X more) and our meantime is down to 52ms (nearly 3x faster). and the bandwidth is now nearly 140Mb/s, again, nearly 3x higher.

and CPU usage is a little bit lower too!

So, happy days! Tomorrow I will be working on my RB5009 install, so photos, shouting and more will be uploaded then… but for now, some links.

Day 27 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 27 of and it does look like WordPress is running correctly and quite fast… Yesterday’s messing with configs got Varnish, Memcached and Redis all running along with upgrading from PHP8.0 to 8.2. The problem now seems to be related to caching rules… So, some messing with that is required… My RB5009 is now stuck in France and has been there since Friday… It is scheduled for delivery on Wednesday, so that will be a fun day breaking stuff… Its been on quite the trip. Most of that was in 3 days, but it got stuck in France and hasnt moved over the weekend… Fingers crossed it arrives on Wednesday!

So, some links… yea, some are not exactly home lab, but its homelab adjacent?

Day 26 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 26 of #100daysofhomelab and I have been trying to figure out why my internet has been unstable today… it up and down a few times… well, parts of it are… Zerotier seems to be sorting out my main network, it’s smaller parts that are going wonky… I am half thinking of leaving it till next weekend since my RB5009 arrives next week… This should help me sort out my network…

Also, spending time upgrading my WordPress site too… just making sure all is working correctly… Fun times…

[Update]: I have managed to upgrade to PHP 8.2, the latest Nginx and now have Varnish in front of the site… Let’s see what breaks…

Day 25 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 25 of #100daysofhomelab, and not done much in the way of home lab work today, but has tested the bejesus out of the internet connection! I bought a Backblaze License for my Mac Book Pro, which initially has around 2.3Tb to backup. There are my YouTube Videos along with code and other bits… It looks like it has uploaded 290 Gb in the last 24 hours…

I also bought an Xbox Series X, and have downloaded a few games to it too… I previously had an Xbox One S with the Games Pass Ultimate, so those games were downloaded. I think it’s downloaded nearly 200 GB in the last few hours! Finally, my mother got home from the hospital yesterday and found a Netflix TV show she wanted to watch and has binge-watched most of it. That seems to be a bit more sedate 20Gb since last night… Overall, the Zerotier-backed connection seems to be working well!

Other than that, watched the Techno Tim video on MaaS. Looks interesting. And I am also looking into the idea of using Mastodon/Fediverse replies in WordPress… I found this post about doing it on static sites. More digging required i think, but now I’m off to play Flight Simulator!

Day 24 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 24 of #100daysofhomelab and most of it was spent migrating my ADS-B stuff from a VM to a Raspberry Pi (see Day 23 for links). So far, I am “feeding” FlightRadar24, ADSB Exchange, FlightAware and RadarBox. I also love some of the graphs I am getting out of it below. Currently, the antenna I am using is a little small and hanging out of a window, so I am missing some flights. The next plan is to get a better one and move the Pi to the CloudShed where I can mount the antenna better.

Day 23 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 23 of #100daysofhomelab and i am trying to do some migration today. I built my ADB-S monitor for both FlightRadar24 and ADBSExchange on my ESXi host, and now i want to move it to my Raspberry Pi… So, trying to get my Pi 4 working (not sure if the SD is wonkey, or something else is wrong) but thats my challange… I am using the following guide which allows you to run this as a docker instance on the Pi, which means, in theory, adding extra servers (which, in the case of the premium ones, like FlightRadar24) give you free service while you supply data.

And as usual, some links i found…

That’s about it for the day. Till next time…

Day 22 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 22 of #100daysofhomelab and I have been planning out my network update for when my RB5009 arrives… Not ready to share, yet, but it should be here on the 2nd Feb, so I will have a plan (maybe) by the weekend… Other than that, it’s a link dump for today:

Ok, I kind of got the following diagram, but it only makes sense in my head, and I’m not even sure it makes sense there… I’ll leave this here without further explanation, till maybe the weekend…

Day 21 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 21 (slightly late, forgot to post this last night) of and its a links day.

on a more different note, my Mikrotik RB5009UG+S+IN is finally on its way! Hopefully will have it next week! Happy days!

Day 19 of #100daysofhomelab

Day 19 of #100daysofhomelab and not done a lot today, so its mostly links…