It’s like the original Home lab but this time, not quite as bad.

Home labs are very personal, what works for me wont work for you. What you like, I may dislike. Homelab V2.

The whole idea behind why Homelab V2 has come about, is because one of the services I host, Mealie, crashed and burnt so badly that we were having to go back to using cook books and digging through the backup JSON to find recipes.

The new lab is designed to score high on the SOAP scale (significant other acceptance parameters) - that is to say, my partner finds it simple to consume services and treats it like it’s a Saas product.

It’s designed to be immutable, git native and cheap as possible to run, with as little maintenance required.

Brief overview of the homelab’s I’ve had

It started in my parents house where I used to have a 48U rack

I then migrated most of my things to SaaS offerings because I had to sell the servers, which was a sad day. Luckily they were able to go to an old friend of mine from School who would put them to good use

I moved around a lot between moving out of my parents house and then when I got my own apartment, which meant I couldn’t have anything permanent setup.

Finally, when I landed in Berkshire, I had means to actually setup something somewhat reliable. I present, k3s at home

This cluster was great, it only really had one outage, and for the most part was pretty decent.

However, there were massive reliability issues when I moved to my new address. Namely, the IP address all changed for some reason, and the certificates also expired. I decided it was time to do something about it

Homelab v2

Homelab V2 is, for all intents and purposes, RAID but with computers.

The lab is built off of a stack of Dell 3040 SFF PC’s with 8gb ram each, and 128GB SSD’s.

Currently, there are 6 of these, with 5 running, and one as a spare.

As you can deduct from the table above, I am still running Kubernetes. But this is where it changes. I am now running Talos, a full OS rendition of Kubernetes designed to be lightweight and it’s all configured from a file. You can get cool tools like talhelper that help you template out config and generate node config off a single central file.

Unlike K3s which is installed on Ubuntu as a binary, Talos is the operating system and also the Kubernetes.

I won’t go too much in to the Kubernetes setup details here, as I plan to write another blog post about this where I touch one some more interesting details

Todo: Write blog post on Talos cluster!

I’ve got 3 nodes in this cluster. You’re probably thinking “hang on, there’s 4 nodes in the table above, but only 3 here?” and you’re right.

The 4th node is a single node cluster called utils that runs some utility apps. (I touch on these apps later)

The last node is just an Ubuntu host running mariadb as of current, however some apps require Postgres so I need to get that installed.

What apps are you running

Currently, I am running

• Mealie
• Gatus
• Pocket-id (does all my OIDC auth)
• Hound (Git repo search)
• Atlantis (Terraform PR automation)
• Postfix Mail forwarder (Allows me to set up internal apps to send mail without having to deal with per application authentication. It’s authenticated in one place)

What apps are planned

• Jellyfin
• Linux ISO Downloading software
• Pinchflat
• ErsatxTV
• Airtrail
• Kanboard.org OR Vikunja
• Karakeep (Previously Hoarder)
• Paperless-ngx
• IT Tools
• changedetection.io
• Snipe-IT (Used to host this, just need to revive it from the dead)
• Wallos
• Wazuh
• Umami
• Matomo (Need to revive from the dead…)
• Terraform registry Cace (Using NGINX) to speed up local Atlantis
• Lube Logger (It’s for cars…)
• Donetick
• FreshRSS

Where are you storing everything

I was able to pick up a Synology nas on Ebay for around £800 (Yes, that went down very well with the Partner) and serving iSCSI LUN’s over to the Talos nodes

Closing notes

This is a real great starting point for the lab. Everything is fresh and new, and I am doing it right the first time. Keep an eye out on the site for new posts