Homelab - Part 1 May 18, 2021 on Jonathan's Blog Tags: homelab, devops, self-hosting

Now that I have finished university I have nearly 5 months of unemployment ahead of me before I start my graduate role at Sky. Therefore I need a project to keep my entertained. I have a huge list of things to get done, some of which will end up immortalised as blog posts on here. However, if you are reading this you are probably here to hear about the beginnings of my Homelab.

What is a Homelab

r/homelab provides the following definition¹:

Homelab [hom-læb](n): a laboratory of (usually slightly outdated) awesome in the domicile

So essentially, it is some hardware that you set up a home in order to:

1. Experiment with “enterprise” kit in your home
2. Learn about network infrastructure
3. Self-host your own apps and services

For me it’s the predominantly the last one, with a little of number 2 in there as well. I will get to play with the enterprise stuff at work and my degree has taught me about the underlying infrastructure, therefore its mainly the benefits of self-hosting and the DevOps experience I get along the way that I am interested in.

So to quickly summarise, a homelab is some tech you have at home that you can play around with, learn about and have fun with all at the same time.

The benefits of self-hosting

• You own your data. If it’s on your hardware, then you own it. You aren’t giving your memories to Google or relying on Spotify and Netflix to have the music and tv you want to watch.
• You learn a lot. Setting up some of this stuff isn’t easy and isn’t for beginners (there is a lot that is though) and it can be a bit of a steep learning curve. However the community is great and will probably help you if you ask 😜
• You can make it your own. This may seem obvious, it may not, but self-hosting gives you that all important freedom to do whatever you like and with that comes the ability to tweak pretty much everything to your liking. There is a big overlap between free-software² and self-hosting so if you are so inclined you are almost certainly able to contribute to or fork a project so that a feature you have always wanted is included. And failing that, ask nicely and someone might get to it eventually.

My current experience

So you might be able to tell that this isn’t exactly new to me. Although this is first time I am inclined to call it a Homelab, I have had some form of self-hosting going for a little while. Mainly on Raspberry Pis and as virtual machines on my desktop PC, so I have been quite limited in what I can do, but its a great place to start if you aren’t sure it’s for you, or if you can’t afford to build or buy a server.

My credentials in the Homelabbing space are:

• Self-hosted Nextcloud³, Minecraft, Jellyfin⁴ (Just for me on a RPi)
• Deployed K8s⁵ clusters the hard way⁶ and with various scripts
• Work experience with cloud technologies, docker and networking
• My dissertation was half DevOps
• I have a computer science degree in which I took some advanced networking modules

I definitely do not know everything, far from it and I would still call myself a Homelab beginner. A lot of the things I have set up were relatively easy and my practical experience is limited, hence Homelab - Part 1 and not Homelab - Part x.

The sad state of affairs that is my home network

I wish I could tell you my home network was dreamy with gigabit fibre broadband, high quality switches and access points, ethernet everywhere and all the bells and whistles.

However, the real state of my network is dire. I am a student still (technically) when writing this and I live in a flat, which I rent, therefore my ability to install ethernet, access points and the rest is limited.

I also had the misfortune of falling in love with a flat that receives a maximum of 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speed.

My home network actual consists of a Sky Hub with a single 25m ethernet cable clipped to the skirting board all the way to the office. In there it goes in to a 5 port gigabit switch and provides the upstream for my PC, a range extender (because we have concrete walls too 😦), the printer and my Raspberry Pi.

I do plan to upgrade all this in the future but I don’t see the point in getting good network hardware when the highest speed it will see is 10Mbps.

Building a “Server”

From my research it seems that there are four main choices when it comes to getting in to homelabbing. These are listed below in order of cost (both initial and ongoing, descending):

1. The first is to buy enterprise grade kit second or third hand from somewhere like eBay and deal with the incessant whining of high rpm fans and the power bill that will kill your WAF⁷.
2. (My choice) Buy components, either new or used, and build a server PC yourself.
3. Buy some kit like Raspberry Pis and have a play since they are cheap and low power. One day you might even get to a crazy setup that dwarfs enterprise solutions⁸.
4. The last is that you just had some old kit lying around like an old PC and you install an operating system on it an you’re good to go. Unfortunately I am not in that position and all the kit I have is either in use or useless.

So I decided to use consumer parts and build my own server PC. Although for similar money I could have purchased a rack mountable, ex-enterprise server, this would be extremely overkill for my needs and in the long run probably cost me an arm and a leg whilst killing baby seals in the process.

The Parts

What services will I be deploying?

I can divide the software portion into a few different categories. These being the host operating system, main virtual machines and then the services I will use internally and the services I will use externally.

Host Operating System

For the host operating system I will be using Proxmox Virtualization Environment (PVE)⁹ which is AGPLv3¹⁰ and is a distribution of linux based on Debian. It is virtualization management system that is based on QEMU/KVM, with which I am familiar, and will therefore allow me to create virtual machines easily. It also provides some nice management features and supports clustering with other PVE nodes for redundancy - something I may explore in the future.

My reasoning for choosing a virtualization environment over a server OS like Ubuntu 20.4 LTS is that I hope to run several virtual machines in the future including TrueNAS Core for data storage, pfsense for routing and K8s.

Main Virtual Machines

For now there will be only a single virtual machine, however as I explained in my rationale for the host operating system, I plan to add more in the future.

The one virtual machine will basically use all of the system resources not consumed by Proxmox and will house a K8s cluster. I have toyed with splitting my cluster into a few separate virtual machines but given that they will all be on the same hardware, the redundancy and high-availability benefits are void - it’s also just me using it and if it goes down, I just have to deal with it.

K8s is a container orchestration tool that will allow me to neatly run all of my services with much less overhead than if I provisioned virtual machines for them all. It is also a great technology to learn in 2021.

Utilities and Services for Internal Use

High Priority:

• NGINX Proxy¹¹: Access to services
• Wireguard¹²: Remote access to home network
• Prometheus¹³: Monitoring
• Grafana¹⁴: Dashboard for metrics
• Syncthing¹⁵: File synchronisation between devices

Nice to Have:

• Transmission¹⁶: BitTorrent client
• Sonarr¹⁷: TV Show Management
• Radarr¹⁷: Movie Management
• Lidarr¹⁷: Music Management
• Jackett¹⁸: Query aggregator for *arr apps above
• Organizr¹⁹: Dashboard for services

Services for External Use

High Priority:

• Jellyfin⁴: Movies, TV, Music
• Nextcloud³
• Tiny Tiny RSS²⁰: RSS Aggregator
• My Personal Website

Medium Priority:

• Photos: Photoprism (Synced with Nextcloud)
• Prosody IM²¹: XMPP
• Paperless-ng: Document manager

Nice to Have:

• Recipe Sage²²: Recipe management and food planner
• Sourcehut²³: Software Development

What’s next?

Well, the first thing is to build the PC. The parts are on the way and as soon as they arrive I will get started. Then I need to setup Proxmox and Kubernetes. After that I will get started on moving over some of the services I already self-host and the things that I have labelled as High Priority. Once all that is done I will move on to the other services, and eventually I will start adding in more VMs for things like TrueNAS Core and pfsense, but thats a while away yet.

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