My Personal Homelab

Overview

I maintain a home lab environment for experimenting with infrastructure, automation, and self-hosted services. This setup allows me to gain hands-on experience with enterprise-grade tools and technologies while maintaining control over my personal data and services.

Hardware Infrastructure

My current hardware setup includes:

Compute Systems

  • Dell Optiplex 5000 PC

    • Primary node running Proxmox VE
    • Hosts the main k3s cluster

  • Two Beelink Mini PCs

    1. Secondary Proxmox VE node (clustered with Dell Optiplex)
    2. Dedicated container host running podman for various services and automation tasks

  • RaspberryPi 3

    • not currently used mainly due to its performance limitations

  • HP Laptop

    • Running Ubuntu Server
    • Used for testing and development tasks
    • qdevice for Proxmox HA

Network & Storage

  • Synology NAS (DS923+)

    • Primary network storage
    • Backup target for critical data

  • Network Equipment

    • eero6 router & mesh network for reliable whole-home coverage
    • TP-Link unmanaged gigabit switch for high-speed local connectivity
    • APC UPS Pro 1500VA for power protection

Software Stack

My lab runs a mix of containerized and traditional services:

Infrastructure Services

  • Container Orchestration: k3s Kubernetes cluster
  • Virtualization: Proxmox VE cluster
  • Container Runtime: Mix of Docker, Podman, and LXC containers
  • Remote Access: Tailscale VPN for secure connectivity
  • Reverse Proxy: Traefik for service routing and SSL termination

Authentication

  • Authentication: Authentik for identity and access management

Automation Tools

  • GitOps: ArgoCD for automated deployments
  • Secrets Management: HashiCorp Vault with argocd-vault-plugin
  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform for cloud resource management
  • Configuration Management: Ansible for system provisioning and configuration
  • Shell Scripting: Collection of bash scripts for automation and adhoc tasks

Monitoring System

Comprehensive monitoring stack including:

  • Prometheus for metrics collection
  • Grafana for visualization
  • Netdata for real-time performance monitoring
  • Uptime Kuma for monitoring uptime of my public services
  • PingPulse for monitoring the health of internal services (built by me)
  • Loki for log management
  • Crowdsec for security monitoring and prevention

Network Management

Cloud Services

I extend my homelab with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for services that benefit from cloud hosting. This infrastructure is managed through Terraform and Terraform Cloud, taking advantage of OCI's generous free tier.

Application Services

Homelab Setup

Repository Overview

All configurations are version-controlled and publicly available: