Homelab Updates in 2022

Posted 2022-10-12

There's been quite a few updates since my last Homelab Update from almost a year ago in 2021. Since then quite a few things change but just as much has probably stayed the same. I thought I'd go ahead and post a few of my changes.

Probably one of the biggest changes is I dropped all my individual VPS servers and replaced it with a single dedicated server from OVH in the US running Proxmox. It has 64GB of ram, a 500G NVME drive and 2x4T spinning disks. This gives me a lot more flexibility over running standard VPS's as I can now move VM's from my local Proxmox to my OVH Proxmox node very easily. Total cost for this is 77$ a month, including 4 IP addresses, which is roughly 15$ more than I was paying just to host my mail server, synapse and a few misc things. I actually go into a bit of detail about this move here
I've stopped using the built in Proxmox backup tool and instead us a very simple script that simply shuts down the VMs and creates snapshots using ZFS. This let's me also automatically sync all my VM disks between my local and cloud servers to make moving VMs around a snap. The proxmox backup works fine but IMO it's insistence to not use ZFS directly when available stinks.
I've installed and been running TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R510 with 12x 4TB spinning disks as my primary NAS. It mostly stores media and ISO images and doesn't really store any VM disks as I would rather provide SSD drives for that. It's been running since the last RC and outside of one issue with how they configure Kubernetes, it's worked flawlessly.
Speaking of SSD's I've replaced all the spinning drives in my primary local server with 4x 1TB SSD in 2x2 mirrored configuration. This gives me 2TB of stores which is plenty for my needs and I don't need to rely on a NAS or the network to store the disks.

I've also gotten rid of all container orchestration like Nomad and Kubernetes. Honestly if I never have to look at Kubelet log files or deal with another fucking piss poor written Helm chart it will be too soon. And don't get me started on dealing with storage for things. I've switched to just using templated out docker-compose files with SaltStack and it works beautifully.

I have completely disabled all inbound connections to my home and use my OVH server to provide any public access I feel is needed. I switched all my Traefik instances to Caddy (because I absolutely adore Caddy) and really has been working well. Wireguard provides a secure Site to Site VPN tunnel between the my local OPNSense instance and the OPNSense instance running on my cloud server. I still have a bit of securing and tidying to do here but overall it's pretty solid.

We had a hurricane come through a few weeks ago and it gave me the opportunity to really test my "Hurricane Contingency", which involves shifting important VMs from my local server to my cloud server. To be honest I'll probably just leave it on my cloud server at this point as it's just connivent and has plenty of resources for it.

The list of services I'm running has also changed and now they look like this:

Authentik - Providing SSO and login centralization to most of my services
OPNSense - Provides a firewall/router for both my OVH server (it runs as a VM) and my local network (has it's own machine)
Radarr/Sonarr - Downloads things for me so I don't have to do it
Home Assistant - I'd be lost without this
Bookstack - Wiki that I'm mostly just testing to find a good solution for a general family knowledge base
Outline - Very early testing if I find this tool even useful, just wanted to try it
Seafile - One big move I did was move from Nextcloud to Seafile, I wrote a bit about it here. I realized I didn't use anything outside of file syncing and that's one area Nextcloud just gave me too many issues
Zabbix - Monitoring and things. I got fed up with prometheus and gave this a go and really like it!
Vaultwarden - Honestly such a great tool, even got my family on it!
Plex - I finally dropped Jellyfin/Emby for Plex again, I just had way too many problems with the former and Plex seems to always just work and there's nothing more annoying than going to sit down to watch a movie and have to go debug why the hell it wasn't working.
Graylog - Somewhat new but I wanted to try centralizing my logging especially for my firewall logs so I can display awesome dashboards of stats
PowerDNS - Migrated from CoreDNS to PowerDNS but for the most part the setup is the same. There are times having split DNS is kind of annoying though
NocoDB - Open source Airtable/Smart Sheets alternative. Actually a really really really awesome tool and I use it heavily for providing API data to this website without the need to write any real code or manage an API server somewhere just to provide some data. One of my favorite new FLOSS apps.
Synapse - Mostly just host it for bridging between Signal, iMessage and Telegram so I don't have to keep a bunch of different apps. It works well mostly.
Mailcow - My primary mail server, I think I forgot to mention it in my previous update. I've been running it for a really long time and it's never really let me down.

Overall a lot has changed since last December, and I'm sure over the next year the same will happen - but I am happy with the way things are.