Feb 03
Unboxing my new Ubiquiti Unifi Dream Machine Pro and running through basic configurations for my home lab network.
Video Equipment:
Logitech Brio – https://amzn.to/32JN0Dx
Lavalier Mic – https://amzn.to/31vPgOi
Video Capture Software – https://amzn.to/31yq0qQ
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2021/02/03/ubiquiti-unifi-dream-machine-pro-unboxing-and-configuration/
Mar 26
| CPU | RAM | Hard Drives | SSDs | OS |
| Intel Xeon-D 1541 | 32GB | 4x2TB Hard Drives | 2x512GB SSDs | Windows 2012 |
Inside Supermicro Home Lab Server
Intel Xeon D 1541 Specs
Supermicro Small Home Lab Server Noise Reading
As an OS on this server, I initially wanted to go with ESXi. I am, after all, a VMWare kind of guy. However, this machine has an on board RAID controller. The on board Intel RAID controller is just software RAID. It will not pass through to ESXi and ESXi will not see anything attached to it. Given the cost of the machine, explained below, I decided not to purchase an additional RAID card at the time. Plus, I wanted to use it as an opportunity to learn something new. I opted to install Windows Server 2012 and configure Hyper-V. This was something very new to me. I have only dabbled with Hyper-V in the past. Most of the environments I work with are VMWare based. So far, it has worked out very well.
Cost wise, this system is not for the faint of heart. The case/motherboard combo cost $1,224.99, the RAM cost 297.99 and shipping cost me $36.84, all for a wopping total of $1,559.82. This price did not include any drives. I saved a few bucks because I already had the 4 drives to stick in the unit, plus two additional 512GB SSDs. If you have almost $1,600 to spend, and you want a very quiet, low power, powerful home server, this is the machine I would go with. I’ve been running it for almost a year and it has been rock solid.
Please feel free to check out some of my latest blog posts or my about me page to learn more!
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/03/26/small-home-lab-server/
Feb 24
For the last year and a half, I have been all about consolidating my gear. I got into this funk where I absolutely wanted nothing to do with enterprise equipment in my home. I wanted to go home and just be home. However, that attitude has sacrificed a lot of my personal learning and growth. I am a guy who LOVES to tinker. Doesn’t really matter what it is, I just love to tinker and I love gear.
After talking with some fellow IT guys during a meeting recently, I realized, I miss having the gear to work on at home. I missed having the resources to test something and not give a care if I break something.
I’ve also recently started this blog and am attempting to teach myself about WordPress, it’s plugins and WAFs (Web Application Firewalls). I felt re-invigorated to acquire some gear new gear. I am hoping this blog, and purchasing some new gear, will keep me interested in a hobby that has turned into a career for me.
I have acquired 2 Dell PowerEdge R610s to use in my rebuilt homelab. Both are outfitted with only 16GB of RAM. Ideally, I would love to increase this to 32-48gb of RAM per host. The price was right on the two machines the way they sit so I figured I would just outfit them as needed. As low power is a slight concern for me, I ordered a pair of Xeon L5630s for each machine.
I would love to have a true Dell SAN to go with the rest of my Dell stack, however, they are subtly out of my price range at the moment. Can you tell? I am a rather big Dell guy when it comes to servers. I picked up an 8 bay Dell R510, was hoping for a 12 bay, but this will give me a start. Honestly, with the size of drives these days, 8 bays should be sufficient for what I am using it for. This will allow me to install my collection of hard drives and pass them through to FreeNAS. I have also picked up a set of 10gb Mellanox cards and cables.
I picked up a pair of Dell PowerConnect 5524Ps. Initially, I planned on using these as my VM switches and picking up a 48 port Cisco of some variation for my core switch. However, I’ve decided I would use both of these for the time being and forgo the Cisco idea. The 5500 series Dell switches support stacking via HDMI cable, not something I have ever tried, but I scored both switches for a song and this is homelab right?
I did however, purchase a Cisco WS-C2960G-8TC-
VLANs, what good is a homelab without VLANs?
I will provision 3 ports on the Cisco C2960G on what I call VLAN5. Taking the link from my cable modem, I will feed the WAN into 1 port, and send it out the other 2 additional ports to my redundant firewalls. VLAN5 will only exist on the Cisco switch. By setting up the environment this way, it gives me a little bit of redundancy, at least, in my mind. Obviously my two single points of failure are my cable modem and the Cisco switch.
As the hosts will have no local storage, we will need to create this VLAN to handle all of the iSCSI/Storage traffic for both. This VLAN will only be present on the Dell stack.
This VLAN will allow the movement of virtual machines back and forth between my two hosts.
VLAN25 is where most of the err….action…happens. This is where my end devices sit. I don’t typically try to break that stuff up in my home environment. This VLAN will be on both the Dell stack and Cisco switch. It will only be present on the Cisco switch so that I can manage the switch from my workstation.
My security cameras were once on VLAN25….with everything else… my network was in essence…flat. I currently have 9 cameras with the plan to add a few more (small farm, we have animals etc so we like to keep an eye on things) – I decided it was time to break them out into their own VLAN. Enter stage left, VLAN35. Some of you reading this may be asking, how does this guy pick his VLAN numbers?? Honestly, the number is in direct correlation to the 3rd octet of the VLAN. So, an example might be, 10.10.35.0/24 – the x.x.35.x is where the number comes from. Just something I came up with and ran with.
I do not typically have a lot of guests at my house, we’re out in the woods and people don’t like to visit. I’m ok with that. However, when we do have the occasional guest, I would rather they be on their own VLAN and have no access to anything other than the internet.
This is a new one for me. VLAN51 will become my secure VLAN. It will have no access to the internet. No access to the rest of the network. Any VMs that are apart of VLAN51 will be shut down when not in use. VLAN51 will be used to network my penetration testing VMs.
Since I am moving my office to my basement, I will be working on installing two dedicated circuits for my new lab. My electrical panel is right there and access is fairly easy. Most likely these will be 2 – 20 amp circuits. I am not an electrician, I just play one on the internet. Just kidding, please if you are going to run your own circuits, be aware of the risks involved. I am fairly comfortable working with electricity.
One thing I regret selling is my UPS. That is a pricey component that I will need to re-acquire at some point. I have a couple of smaller ones, and frankly, it’s my homelab, if it goes offline, eh not the end of the world.
One item that I had a hard time selling when I was consolidating my lab, is my 25u StarTech Open Frame rack. I had advertised it locally numerous times and never had anyone actually come and buy it. So I kept it and I am glad I did. It’s one less thing I need to purchase for the this adventure. I am planning on either enclosing it or putting it in a small server closet in my shop/office. This will hopefully help keep the noise down.
Something I never needed before was a VMUG subscription. I always had access to VMWare products through work. This time around I will be purchasing the $200 subscription so that I can utilize all of the products that come with it. Both of my hosts will be running ESXi. I will also be using the vCenter appliance instead of the Windows based vCenter install since that is the way things are headed anyways.
Several years ago I utilized FreeNAS as my SAN for a POC (Proof of Concept) for a previous employer. This worked out very well. FreeNAS will be once again utilized for this en-devour. It will be installed on an R510 as stated above. Then I will create an iSCSI target and present that to VMWare as a LUN. Once the LUN has been presented to VMWare, we can go to town building out the Virtual Machines. Fairly straight forward here.
As of the moment my virtual machines are…..lacking. I went from having numerous VMs to accomplish one or two tasks down to one physical host and only a couple VMs to do a lot of tasks. Some things on my list to virtualize:
Firewall – pfSense and CARP – this is something I have never tried. Never really had a reason to. I feel like in the spirit of homelab, I should attempt this. Currently I am running a single Untangle firewall on Hyper-V. I love Untangle (so far) but I do not believe there is a way to create a failover cluster. None the less, this could change at any time. I jump from UTM to UTM or Firewall to Firewall. Keeps things exciting you know?
Monitoring – Nagios, Observium (perhaps Grafana will make a debut at some point too)
Domain Controllers – Currently I am working on my Master’s in IT, so I have access to the Microsoft Imagine program, so I will more then likely be spinning up a couple DCs to work with.
File Server (either nextcloud or something)
Security related – AlienVault, Nessus, and a dedicated KALI VM. Perhaps even a couple other pentest VMs on a secure VLAN.
Patch Management – ManageEngine
Web Server – Centos 7/WordPress/MySQL
Home Automation and Security – HomeSeer
Media – Plex (and maybe iHome Media Server too)
Additionally, aside from my 2 hosts and the R510 SAN, I do have several physical machines present in the lab. One of the biggest tasks will be to remove all of my VMs off my Hyper-V box and turn my Hyper-V box into a BlueIris/Nakivo backup box. I switched to BlueIris from Ubiquiti’s NVR recently, and although I am loving Blue Iris, I find it resource intensive. So I will be leaving it as a physical box. The way I figure it, I can remove all the other tasks off my SuperMicro Mini and then have room for Nakivo along side Blue Iris. That machine has plenty of oomph for those two tasks.
I have a custom built workstation that I can never figure out what to do with, so I ordered up a 2u case and will be racking that as well. This will server as my media ingest machine. By that I mean, when I buy my next lot of DVDs and Bluerays or borrow them, I will use this machine to ingest the media and flip it to my Plex server.
A secure homelab or network environment should have a jump box or jump point. For me, my Intel Skull Canyon NUC will become this. Just a versatile box that is always on. Something I can hit from the field. My NUC will also be tied to a TV or screen in my office so that I can monitor the systems in real time.
*Update*
Check out my latest Home Lab rebuild posts
Dell R610 Intel Xeon CPU Upgrades – to see my progress on the two new hosts!
Add VLANs and Assign Ports on Cisco 2960G Switch – to see some configurations on my WAN switch
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/02/24/homelab-rebuild-network-hosts-freenas-dell-r510/
Feb 09
Having spent the last few years of my career in a Dell networking environment, I have decided that I will be adding a Dell switch to my personal collection. In this tutorial, I will show you how to add a VLAN via the CLI on a Dell PowerConnect 5524p switch. This tutorial assumes you know how to connect to the switch either by a using a console cable or SSH.
Use Putty (or another similar tool) to either SSH or serial/console into your switch. This will get you into the CLI.
To begin, we need to enter the configuration mode. To do this, type “conf t” at the prompt and press enter. You will now be in config mode and see (config) to the left of the # sign.
Creating the V-LAN itself is a fairly easy task. Type the command “vlan database” and press the enter key.
Pick your V-LAN number and type “vlan #” and press the enter key. Where the # is, place your vlan number. So, in this tutorial we will use vlan 55.
In order to configure an IP address for our newly created VLAN, we must use the command “interface vlan 55”. This allows us to enter the interface configuration.
Give your V-LAN an IP Address if so desired, use the command “ip address x.x.x.x x.x.x.x” The first set of x’s represents the IP Address, the second set represents the subnet mask. So in my case, the command would be, “ip address 192.168.55.1 255.255.255.0”
Giving your V-LAN a name also helps distinguish what the V-LAN is for. Enter the command “name” followed by the name you have picked. So: name “test vlan”
Before you exit Putty, make sure you issue the command “copy run start” otherwise, if you reboot your switch, you will lose the configuration changes you just made.
Please feel free to check out the rest of my blog posts for other tutorials and information from the home lab!
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/02/09/vlan-configuration-on-dell-powerconnect/
Feb 08
This tutorial will cover manually adding MIB, Management Information Base, files to Ubuntu. Specifically, Dell and Ubiquiti MIBs.
You can acquire the Ubiquiti MIBs here:
Ubiquiti MIBs
Ubiquiti UniFi MIBs
Dell Switch MIBs are included within the firmware when you download it from Dell. This process should work for adding just about any MIB to Ubuntu. You can see my post titled “Dell PowerConnect 5524P Firmware Upgrade” to learn how to obtain the Dell firmware.
You will need WinSCP and Putty fohttps://achubbard.com/2018/01/29/dell-powerconnect-5524p-firmware-upgrade/r this tutorial.
Launch WinSCP and navigate to the home directory for the user you logged in as. Within the home directory, right click and create a new folder. I called mine “mibs” to keep things simple. Copy all of your mib files from your computer to this location.
Now that the mibs files are located on your Ubuntu server, we need to get them into the correct directory. For this we will use Putty. Open up Putty and connect to your Ubuntu server.
Type the command “sudo cp /home/username/mibs/*.mibs /usr/share/snmp/mibs/”
Where username is, put your account username. So in my case, my command would look like this: sudo cp /home/altach/mibs/*.mibs /usr/share/snmp/mibs/
This will copy all of the files with the .mib file extension to the /usr/share/snmp/mibs/ folder.
Another way to get MIB files on your Ubuntu server is to use the wget command. We will use the Ubiquiti MIBs for this example.
Open Putty and connect to your Ubuntu server. Create and/or navigate to the “tmp” folder. Navigate to it by issuing the command “cd /tmp”
This is where you can now download your Ubiquiti MIB files to.
Type: “sudo wget http://dl.ubnt-ut.com/snmp/UBNT-MIB” and the Ubiquiti MIB file will then be downloaded to your /tmp folder. You can use any folder you wish, I just happend to use a /tmp folder. Issue the command again using the path for the UniFi MIBs if needed.
When the MIBs have been downloaded, you can now copy them to the /usr/share/snmp/mibs/ folder by issuing the command “sudo cp UBNT-* /usr/share/snmp/mibs/
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/02/08/add-mib-files-ubuntu/
Jan 31
This tutorial will show you how to install CentOS minimal on a Hyper-V virtual machine. We will also focus on getting network connectivity.
Before we begin this tutorial, please head over to centos.org and grab a copy of the latest ISO of CentOS Minimal, link below.
Once you’ve downloaded your ISO, on your server or workstation running Hyper-V, launch the Hyper-V management console.
Within the management console, right click on your server, and select “New” and then “Virtual Machine”
Give your new VM a name and instruct Hyper-V on where to store the config files.
Select the amount of memory you want your virtual machine to have. In my case, I have chosen to give mine 1024mb or 1gig.
Pick your network connection (this is your virtual switch) and click “next”
Once you’ve assigned your new VM a network connection, you need to create a virtual hard disk for it. Select “Create Virtual Hard Disk” from the menu, give it a name, select the location you wish to save it in and the size.
Now we must tell Hyper-V where to find the CentOS ISO that we downloaded. Select “Install an operating system from a boot CD/DVD-ROM” pick the “Image File (.iso)” option. Click on “Browse” and locate the ISO. Then click “Next”
Finally a summary page will be displayed. This will tell you all of the options that you selected for your virtual machine. At this step, please click on “Finish.” Clicking “Finish” will bring you back to the Hyper-V management console.
In the Hyper-V management console, find your newly created virtual machine, select it and right click. Click on the “Connect” option that appears.
Go ahead and click on the green power button to fire up your VM.
Your virtual machine will now begin to read the ISO inserted into it’s virtual optical drive. Using the arrows on your keyboard, highlight the “Install CentOS 7” and hit the enter key.
Select your language. In my case, I left it as the default of English. Then click continue.
Select the disk on which you wish to install CentOS. I typically allow CentOS to use the automatic partitioning feature. Then click “Done”
During the installation, you are asked to set a root password and/or create a user. I have chosen to do both. You may click each icon and assign a password and create a user. CentOS will then set these during it’s installation.
Allow CentOS to complete it’s installation process. Once this step is complete, the virtual machine will reboot. Once it has rebooted, you will see the following prompt. Here you can login with either your root user or the user you had CentOS create during installation. CentOS is now installed.
CentOS minimal out of the box on Hyper-V will not get an IP Address. You can verify this by logging in and issuing the command “ip addr”
If you get an IP address, you should see it listed under “eth0” – in this case we do not see an IP address. This is because CentOS does not go out and try to grab an IP on boot. In order to change this, you must issue the command, “vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0”
To change this config, hit the “i” key to switch vi into insert mode. Arrow down until you get to the last entry, “ONBOOT”, you must change this from “no” to “yes” – when you’ve changed this, hit the : key and type wq to write the changes and quit vi.
Restart your network interface by issuing the command “systemctl restart network” – CentOS will hang for a moment and then restart the network adapter.
Now you can issue the command “ip addr” again and you should see an IP address listed for interface eth0.
You now have a base CentOS Minimal install with network connectivity. This will give you a great base to install Nagios. I will be writing a tutorial shortly on the installation and configuration of Nagios Core on CentOS.
Check out some of my other blogs on Hyper-V!
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/01/31/centos-7-minimal-installation-hyper-v/
Jan 30
When it comes to security cameras, I have pretty much been an advocate for anything Ubiquiti. Especially when there is a budget to work with. Their cameras are fairly good quality for a decent price. Ubiquiti also includes their NVR software free of charge. I, personally, have had great success with the above mentioned software. Some hiccups here and there, but nothing major to write home about. That being said, lately I have had the desire…the want… for something more out of my home camera/NVR system that Ubiquiti does not offer at this time. A great addition to my system would be a couple of PTZs.
For those of you who do not know what a PTZ camera is, it stands for, Pan, Tilt and Zoom. This allows the user to move the camera about instead of having it in a fixed position.
In order to pull this off and add some PTZs to my network of cameras, I had to come up with a different NVR solution. This is where Blue Iris comes into play. I knew I could not replace all of my Ubiquiti cameras and really had no need to. However, I needed a solution that would play nice with them. Something else Ubiquiti is not exactly known for.
I purchased a copy of Blue Iris for $60 and installed it on my home server.
I then began to remove my Ubiquiti cameras from the Ubiquiti NVR software by using the “unmange” option. Once all of the cameras were out of the Ubiquiti NVR, I then logged into each camera and set them to “Standalone” mode. This allows them to send an RTSP feed. Blue Iris can then receive the RTSP feed. 
Once you have put the camera into “Standalone” mode, it will reboot.
You can now launch Blue Iris and add the camera to it. You will need your RTSP URL and port number. In this case, it is 192.168.35.101:554
Within the Blue Iris Admin Console, right click anywhere and select “Add new camera” from the popup menu.
A dialogue box will appear. Give your new camera a Full Name and a Short Name.
Under “Type” make sure it is set to “Network IP”
On the “Options” section, I chose to enable all 3. These are optional, you may pick whatever options fit your situation.
When you are satisfied with the settings, click on the “Ok” button. A new dialogue box will appear. Here you will want to leave the first drop down as “http://” and then enter the IP and port number of the camera. So in my case, 192.168.35.101:554. The “Make” will be “Generic” and the model will be “RTSP H.264/H.265/MJPG/MPEG4. Under the “Video” section, set “Path” as “/s0”, Audio Format can be set to “64kbps G.711 u-law”
I left the additional settings alone. Something I am trying to get working in the future is to require a username/password for the RTSP feed. Currently I have left those blank. From my research, Ubiquiti does not seem to support that as an option with Blue Iris at this time. I am ok with this as my cameras are on a separate VLAN on my home network.
Go ahead and click “Ok” – You should now be able to see your Ubiquiti camera within Blue Iris.
Now that I have my Ubiquiti cameras working within Blue Iris, I can go ahead and any other type of camera to my system, this includes PTZs.
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/01/30/feeding-ubiquiti-cameras-into-blue-iris/
Jan 30
This is a tutorial on how to configure a VLAN on a Ubiquiti Unifi Controller and switch. We will also go over how to use the second ethernet port on a Ubiquti NanoStation on a different VLAN for use with a Ubiquiti Security Camera.
I have a rather long driveway, our upper half of the driveway is where my office and house are located. The lower half houses an area for our growing animal population and parking. I have multiple VLANs, 1 of which is for my security cameras. I wanted the 2nd port on the Ubiquiti NanoStation placed on the lower portion of the driveway to be able to utilize my camera VLAN.
This tutorial will assume that all of the hardware is in place and you are ready to make the secondary ethernet port on the NanoStation work on another VLAN.
In my case, I have a Unifi Controller that will need to be configured with my security VLAN, VLAN35, prior to configuring my NanoStations.
Enter the Unifi controller and navigate to Settings >Networks. 
Click on the “Create New Network” button. Select “VLAN Only” from the “Purpose” section. Give your VLAN a name and a number. I chose 35.
You can then configure any other settings for your new VLAN that you may need. In my case, I only needed the basics. No DHCP on my security VLAN. You can then click on the “Save” button.
Once saved, in the Unifi controller, navigate to “Devices”
Select your switch and it will open the device’s configurations on the right hand side of the page. Select your port from the list and click “Edit”
On my “Core” (I use quotations because it is not really a core switch, but it is my main switch) I picked port 2 to use for my NanoStation uplink.
You want to make sure the “Switch Port Profile” is set to “All” – The reason is that this port is going to act as a trunk port and provide all of the VLANs to your first NanoStation. You want this if you wish to pass all of your VLANs over the bridge. Click “Apply”
Next, login to the web interface of your NanoStation that will be acting as the “Station” – Navigate to the “Wireless” tab. Here you want to configure your wireless bridge settings (IE: your SSID, WPA2 Key, Channel Width etc) – I will leave that up to you to determine what works for your application. Since this NanoStation is acting as the “Station” you want to make sure the “Wireless Mode” is set to “Station”
Below is what I chose for my settings:
Once the wireless portion of your first station is configured, go to the “Network” tab. Here you can configure your station with a static IP etc. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will assume you have already given your station a static IP address, gateway, mask, DNS and so forth. You will want to make sure that the “Network Mode” is set to “Bridge” and that the “Configuration Mode” is set to “Simple”
After completing the setup of your first NanoStation, login to the web interface of the second NanoStation. First go to the “Wireless” tab on your second NanoStation. This time you will want “Wireless Mode” to be set as “Access Point” – You will then match the rest of the settings to the settings you configured on the “Wireless” tab on your first NanoStation.
Once you have selected your settings, navigate to the “Network” tab on your second NanoStation. This is where things get to be a little be more complex. Since the wireless bridge itself is passing all of the VLANs across it, we need to tell the NanoStation what VLAN to use for the 2nd onboard ethernet port. This is the port we will be daisy chaining our camera off of.
On station number 2, your “Network Mode” will also be set to “Bridge”, you will have the option to set a static IP, mask, gateway and so forth. The real difference here is that the “Configuration Mode” MUST be set to “Advanced” this will open up a slew of different options for you.
When “Advanced” is selected, you will now see a bunch of options at the bottom of the page. For this example, the LAN0 port is feeding a switch, the LAN1 port is what the camera will be daisy chained off of and WLAN0 is the wireless bridge between the two NanoStations.
Under the VLAN Network section, we first must add VLAN35 to each interface. This will allow the NanoStation to pass VLAN 35 over the wireless bridge and the 2 ethernet ports.
After adding the VLAN to the interfaces, come on down to the “Bridge Network” section. If memory serves me correctly, you must break the existing bridge to configure a new bridge.
BRIDGE0 is allowing LAN0 and WLAN0 to communicate thus passing management traffic to the switch connected to that ethernet port.
BRIDGE1 is allowing LAN1 and WLAN0.35 to communicate thus allowing camera traffic to pass from LAN1 to the wireless bridge, and back to the NVR.
After configuring the bridges, you must go up to the “Management Network Settings” section. Select “Management Interface”, in my case, it is “BRIDGE0” or my “management” VLAN.
The final step before you can plug the camera in, is to enable POE Passthrough. This allows the NanoStation to power the camera via POE on the secondary LAN port. On your second NanoStation, navigate to the “Advanced” tab. Scroll down until you find “Advanced Ethernet Settings”. Check the checkbox labeled “POE Passthrough enabled”. Click the change button and you should now be able to power up your camera on a separate VLAN.
Hope this helps someone, I spent a lot of time trying to get this to work on my property.
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/01/30/ubiquiti-unifi-vlan-configuration-and-nanostation-ethernet-port-vlan-configuration/
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