My Homelab

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So now that we have that out of the way (it’s a great article, you probably should read it), a Homelab is basically whatever you have around to make it, and make it useful for what you need!

My current homelab setup consists of:

• A Synology DS412+ with a total of 11TB (4x4GB in a Synology Hardware RAID [SHR])
  • This was the backbone of the beginnings of homelab journey, definitely a workhorse, outside of a few power downs due to moving, and furniture configurations, it’s been on 27/7/365 for about 11 years. Of course the drives have been upgraded over time, as my storage needs grew. More on that later
• Raspberry Pi
  • I have a number of these, and they all had their place at one point in time, from
    • Pi-Hole Ad Blocker w/ OpenVPN server
    • Plex streamer (Direct media pass-through, there is no way you’re transcoding on one of these
    • HomeAssistant server
    • A remote desktop to access when away from home
  • Current uses
    • A Pi Zero setup at my parents’ home for
      • VPN access when I need to do check on their systems
      • Set a tunnel for backups to my Synology
    • A Pi 3B running HyperHDR and WS2812B LEDs on my living room TV, aka The Tinker’s Philips Hue
    • A Pi 3B+ as a retro gaming “console”
• HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini (the heart of my homelab)
  • i5-8500 | 32GB DDR4 | 1x1TB NVMe & 1x512GB NVMe
  • ESXi 7
    • A lot of people use Proxmox, and I get it, it’s readily available, and if you type in Homelab into YouTube, every other video is about Proxmox. I just use VMWare in my day to day, and I’m more comfortable with it.
  • 6 “Production” VMs (my always on VMs)
    • 2 Docker VMs
      • Very unnecessary, but I have 2 different Dockers that needed a PostgresDB, but 2 different versions that were incompatible, and changing ports were not an options.
      • 1 is Ubuntu, the other is Alpine
    • A “Sync” VM
      • An Alpine VM with XFCE, setup as a “Master” for Firefox, and Brave browsers across all my devices.
    • A Pi-Hole VM with w/ OpenVPN
      • Just a tiny Debian VM. 16GB with 2GB RAM, and 2 CPU cores, which is more than it will ever need, as it is only using 7GB total HDD, and a whopping 30MHz of CPU
        
      • Also acts as my DHCP server for my network
    • 2 Alpine XFCE VMs, like the Sync VM
      • 1 connected to a VPN
      • 1 connected to my home network
      • A slew of test VMs
        • Its a great workbench for trying things, and getting comfortable. A lab if you will 🤔
• Asus X555LAB
  • This was a great use of an old laptop that was having screen issues. It’s my main Docker “server”. An i5-5200U with 8GB RAM (Max on this is 12GB, and not worth it), and it runs Ubuntu Server 20.04 with no issues, plus he running dockers aren’t very resource heavy at all (more on them later)
    
• Nighthawk R7000 Router running DDWRT
  • DDWRT is an opensource router firmware that extends the capabilities of the standard Netgear firmware, which would tend to be glitchy, and after each update, seemed to break something, or add features that weren’t needed, I figured it was time for a change, and time for full control
    • The ability to have multiple VLANS
      • VLAN10 – Base devices
        • The VMs and Dockers that only are used at home
      • VLAN20 – IoT devices (DHCP controlled by the router)
        • Smart plugs
        • Smart bulbs
        • Smart switches
        • Anything “Smart” doesn’t need access to anything on my network, it’s separated, my VMs and Dockers can talk to them, but they can’t talk back, just talk to their external server, like Tuya, or Samsung
      • VLAN30 – External Services (DHCP controlled by router)
        • These are Dockers that I have pointing outwards, with a dynamic dns, like DuckDNS, or one of my Cloudflare Domains
          • More on that when I talk about my Dockers