Who are you, and what do you do? What do you like to do outside of work?

Hi! My name is Axel Rafn. I am a 45-year-old GenX’er who was born in Iceland but moved to Spain just over a year ago with my wife. Before we moved to Spain, we lived in a self-converted camper/bus (MB Sprinter 412D, 1998 model) for over a year and traveled all over Iceland.

I am a certified systems admin and work as a Linux systems admin, full stack developer, and more as my day job for a communications company back in Iceland, which I work remotely from. There we mainly offer VoIP and SIP services over our satellite system for Icelandic fishing boats and trawlers. But we do other things as well, where I also develop server software for various tasks aboard the boats and on land. My main priorities are maintaining servers as well as setting up new servers with Proxmox, OPNSense, Debian, and Ubuntu, as well as programming in BASH, PHP, Python, and JavaScript.

In my spare time, I run a homelab with various machines and services. I also have my own hosting servers with Linode and Hetzner and even run a Mastodon instance.

I love photography and I am a professional photographer by trade as well.

What hardware do you use?

First of all, my ZSA Voyager, which I love. It goes with me wherever I go when traveling as well.

Then I have a few machines I use daily at my desk. Both my desktop machines are connected to my two MSI G24C4 E2 23.6” 180Hz monitors, and I just switch inputs on the monitors to switch machines.

My main Linux machine is a Ryzen 9 7900 with 32GB RAM, 1TB m.2 NVME and an AMD Radeon RX 6600 graphics card. On it I do most of my software development, all my work for my day job, and even game! I mainly play World of Warcraft, but I do have a big backlog on my Steam account for games to play.

My desktop Mac is a Mac mini M4 with 512GB storage and 16GB Unified Memory. I use it more for my artistic purposes such as video editing, image editing, and writing. But I do also use it for some development for iOS software.

And finally my laptop is a 13” M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB unified memory. On it I also do mostly artistic things, but mainly when I either travel or want to work outside the home on weekends and holidays.

The homelab includes several computers, including two Beelink S12 Pro machines with a N100 CPU—one running Jellyfin for me and the family, and the other a staging machine for yet another project I am working on called Skuld. I run a Beelink EQR5 as a Proxmox host with various virtual machines such as Pi-hole, Homepage, Uptime Kuma, a Ubuntu machine for Docker projects, and more. It has an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 5650U CPU (6c/12t) and 32GB RAM, 2x 1TB m.2 NVME. I also use an older HP Z420 workstation as a Proxmox host. It has a Xeon E5-2680 v2 CPU (10c/20t), 64GB ECC RAM, and a 1TB SSD.

Then there’s a dedicated TrueNAS SCALE machine running on an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G with 16GB of RAM, and in it currently I have 4x 4TB SATA disks in a RAIDz1. I designed the machine so I can add eight more 3.5” drives to it, so when I have more money I plan to buy some new and used disks in the 12-18TB range to fill out the rest of the case.

I also have a 3D printer, a Bambu Lab P1S with an AMS on top. I have not upgraded the hotend to a hardened steel one yet, but plan to do so later this year to be able to print with more exotic filaments.

And what software?

Each machine has different software according to its OS and uses. First, the PCs: Browser-wise I use Firefox for personal things, but Chromium for work-related things at my day job. I use Zed as my main IDE/code editor, since I’m trying to get away from VSCode. Lately I’ve moved to Warp terminal from the others I normally use (iTerm2 and Konsole). I have ZSH installed on all machines as well as Oh My Zsh for theming and plugins.

For video work I solely use DaVinci Resolve, and for images and photos I have been trying out the Affinity suite and plan to buy a license once my trial ends. I was using the photographer subscription from Adobe, but due to their actions and plans with AI, I just didn’t want to be a client of theirs anymore—and simply put, I don’t trust them.

On the Linux machine I run Fedora 41 currently with KDE Plasma as my DE, but I also have Hyprland installed for when I need some extra eye candy and minimalism.

On the Macs, I just run macOS.

As for the servers, I have two physical boxes with Hetzner. The first is a Nextcloud server running on Debian stable, to use for everything and anything, sharing documents, images, photos, and more. I also use it to back up photos from all smart devices we have (phones and tablets) regardless of type, OS, or preferences.

My hosting server is running Ubuntu server, Apache, PHP, and such. The classic LAMP setup, so to speak. This is where I host most of my websites and quite a few for friends and family.

I then also have VPS machines with Linode, where I host a Mastodon server running on Debian Stable, a small server running Gitea as my personal Git server, and a few smaller test servers that run Debian stable, for various projects I am making or involved with. One of those projects is an open source multistreaming tool that will help people stream to Twitch, YouTube, OwnCast, and many more systems that offer live video streaming.

What’s your keyboard setup like? Do you use a custom layout or custom keycaps?

I haven’t modified the default too much, since this was also my first ortholinear keyboard. I have made small changes here and there to make the keyboard flow better with my input language (Icelandic) and make keys be at the place I expect them to be. But I plan to delve deeper into the lore of keyboards and what is the best way to do things like homerows and such.

What would be your dream setup?

Desktop-wise I think I am quite happy where I am. The only thing I could possibly add to my setup, other than better cable management, is to have a KVM switch for three machines so I don’t have to manually unplug and replug the keyboard in to the other computer like I do now.

I do have dreams for a bigger and more powerful homelab, but that is a dream I can still just dream.