Buliding a reasonable home infra

In the era of the internet run by huge companies, one can desire to “disconnect” from them. The best way of doing this would be using software that is placed somewhere where big tech enterprises have limited access. It may be an public cloud like AWS, Azure or GCP. Such a solution is, at least at the beginning, cheaper and easier to set-up than self hosted solutions. Furthermore it allows to scale your software without any special effort.

Unfortunately everything comes with a price. This approach have following issues:

  1. Huge companies can (still) spy on you. The data is laid on their servers. This also means that any government is almost guaranteed to be granted access to your personal information
  2. Scaling is easy, but dramatically expensive
  3. In case of DDOS/DOS you will pay much more than you should

Building a reasonable homelab can overcame all of the given problems. What’s more, for personal usage, homelab solutions are more flexible. They can easily integrate with smart homes. They can build an additional defense layer for your home network. All in all - for the small companies and home usage they are much more suited than cloud based solutions

In the following series I’ll try to cover the subject of building a home infrastructure. I’ll say about a hardware aspect, as well as software part. Last, but not least, I’ll say about environment which lays behind software part

Table of contents

All posts can be found wihin Home infra series

  1. Introduction
  2. Planning infrastructure
  3. Network planning

In progress / planned

  • Network planning
  • Choosing hardware for service nodes
  • Building a good, low-cost storage
  • ZFS - easy solution for simple storage
  • Docker or virtualisation
  • Using ansible to provision your homelab infrastructure
  • Preparing backups node
  • Building custom BMC controller with Raspberry PI and ESP-8266
  • Migrating docker based infrastructure to k8s and k3s

–

  • LDAP - solution for you, your family and friends
  • HAproxy or nginx? Both!
  • Creating your on google drive
  • Photoprism - photography for IT maniacs
  • Privatebin - when you need a real privacy
  • Matrix and Element - single communicator to rule them all
  • Building infrastructure for your code
  • Own internet radio with mopidy and icecase
  • Minio - S3 for your homelab
  • Monitoring of your homelab - icinga2 with grafana
  • Log aggregation with OpenSearch

–

  • How I learned that SSD storage is either highly pricey or extremely dangerous
  • Two kind of people - the common story about backups
  • The real cost of backups
  • OpenVPN with LDAP - risky solution for bad boys
  • Pydio - why not?