If you’re like me, you have a lot of different systems running in different places: at work, at home, in the lab, and in the cloud. And if you’re like me you’ve often struggled to connect and access these machines, especially when you’re on the road. At long last, I have a fully functional solution that lets me access everything from everywhere, securely and efficiently, whether on the open internet or behind NAT after NAT. The solution is ZeroTier!
Terabyte home
Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply
My cloud of Intel NUC servers are powered by a generic slim 12 volt power supply from Chinese company Mean Well. This is a popular power supply with hobbyists and is widely available worldwide. I replaced the non-functional fans and 3D printed a cover for the terminals, and now two of my three “Rabbit” trays are up and running happily.
Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1
I’m quite pleased with the Intel NUC boards that came with my surplus Rabbit cloud, but I can’t say the same about the Nvidia Jetson TK1 boards. They’re weird, flaky, limited, and haven’t proved useful even in simple applications. Frankly, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the 15 Jetsons sitting in my office!
Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs
As I suspected, the Intel NUCs included in my “Rabbit” cloud hardware are proving much more useful than the Nvidia Jetson TK1s. I received both “Silvermont” NUC5 and “Goldmont” NUC6 machines in my surplus eBay cloud hardware, and both are good little machines, with some notable limitations.
Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!
We live in a world of cattle, not pets, and Kubernetes rules the roost. I’ve been meaning to spend some time getting up to speed on the latest but didn’t have enough hardware to make that happen until now. I recently bought a whole pile of surplus hardware so I will be able to experiment with orchestration and container platforms in the office.
