My home lab as gone though a lot of changes since my last full overview in 2023. And while I have posted about the big changes, it’s a new year. Lets do a full state of the home lab.
Hardware
At the heart of my home lab, is the cluster.
Built from three used Dell 7050 micros, and a Synology DS418 NAS. It has 12 CPU cores, 96GB of RAM, and 14TB of storage, and is unimaginably called HL1. This thing runs pretty much everything, DNS, git, remote lan access, and more.
The other bit of hardware, is a Raspberry Pi 5.
This little guy receives ADS-B broadcasts from aircraft using a USB radio, and send the data to Flightradar24. In return, FR24 gives me an equivalent of their top tier plan, at no cost.
Virtual Land
The cluster runs nine VMs.
- HASS (Home Assistant, serves as a zwave hub for Apple Home)
- ntgit (Gitea server)
- Backuper (Custom Backup server (see this post))
- ts-exit (Enables lan access when off network)
- Phonebook (AdGuard Home server)
- DarkBSD (Plain old FreeBSD server for whatever I need)
- mflux (Miniflux server)
- UTK (Uptime Kuma server)
- Ana (Plausible analytics server)
Most of these run on FreeBSD, with the exception of HASS(haOS), ntgit(TurnKey Linux), and mflux, UTK, and ana (Debian 12)
Pretty much all of these VMs are set up with high availability. So if I have to shutdown one of the nodes, the VMs will migrate themselves to a different node. And of one of the nodes, just ups and dies, the other nodes can grab the VMs and restart them on a healthy node.
Ana, shows a great use case for the cluster. This VM provides web analytics for my websites. Plausible requires more RAM than I want to pay for on my VPS, so it runs on the cluster. To make sure inbound traffic doesn’t give away my home IP, all traffic is routed through my VPS over Tailscale.
Cloud Stuff
While a lot runs on the cluster, my websites do not. They run up in the mysterious cloud. Where Comcast can’t touch them.
I currently have two VPSs. The main one is NT-Prod-HouseDuck. HouseDuck runs my main sites (this one and nlp.photos), and handles the reverse proxy rules for things like ana on the home cluster.
The other VPS is IMB-Prod-YL. This runs IsMetroBurning.com. My website that checks if the DC Metro is burning or not (currently sitting at 23 days without burning). This server needs a couple of extra libraries installed (to handle auto posting to X and BlueSky, Mastodon is handled with curl), so that’s why its a separate server.
The other big cloud service I use, is Backblaze B2. Every good home lab needs back ups. You never know when something will break, or when you’ll accidentally do it yourself.