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🌱 I’m currently working on python-SysInformer and python-URLChecker
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📝 I sometimes write articles on My Blog
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🌐 Website 🖥️ Official
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⚡ Hobbies learning new things, breaking and fixing things in my home-lab, watching sports, car detailing, working on my yard
I run a small yet exciting home-lab within my house, where I constantly experiment and gain valuable knowledge. Here's a list of the equipment I currently have in my home-lab:
- Dell Optiplex 5000 PC: running Proxmox VE which hosts my k3s cluster
- Two Beelink Mini PCs:
- running Proxmox VE (clustered with the Dell Optiplex 5000 PC)
- running several podman containers including my primary adguard-home for local dns and various cron jobs scripts
- RasberryPI3: runs replica adguard-home and acts as qdevice to ensure Proxmox HA
- Synology NAS (DS923+): for file storage
- eero6 router & mesh network
- TP-Link un-managed gig switch
- APC UPS Pro 1500VA: for power protection
- Old HP Laptop: running Ubuntu server and used for adhoc tasks
Within my home lab, I operate multiple open-source applications, tools, and services. The majority of these are deployed within my k3s cluster, although some are deployed using docker/podman or directly on the VMs. For example, I utilize podman for deploying and backing up my adguardhome instances, whereas my PostgreSQL and MySQL databases are directly deployed on the VMs. It is worth noting a few additional details:
- I employ traefik as my reverse proxy for all components, including Kubernetes.
- To access my home lab from anywhere, I rely on tailscale (highly recommended) as my VPN solution.
- I use Lens to help manage my k3s cluster. Although I enjoy working with the terminal, I find GUIs useful for certain management tasks.
- argocd serves as my gitops tool within the k3s cluster. Currently, approximately 75% of my services are deployed using argocd. However, I am cautious about relying entirely on argocd due to its potential impact on the cluster's performance.
- To handle secrets, I utilize vault and the argocd-vault-plugin to inject secrets into pods as part of my gitops workflow.
- For monitoring, I employ a combination of tools such as prometheus, grafana, and netdata. I previously used the kube-prometheus-stack but found it to be too resource intensive for my little cluster. Additionally, I rely on uptime-kuma to monitor the availability of my public facing services and websites. These are exposed to the internet either using CloudFlare Pages or Cloudflare Tunnels.
- To handle local DNS, I rely on adguardhome, and for ad-blocking, I combine adguardhome with cloudflare.
Apart from my home-lab, I have deployed multiple servers within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to host various services. I use OCI over AWS or GCP because they have a very generous free tier that allows me run multiple servers without incurring any costs. These servers are deployed and manged using Terraform and Terraform Cloud.
Finally, here is a screenshot showing some (but not all) of the applications that are currently deployed in my home-lab:
If you wish to delve deeper into my home-lab's operations, I have GitHub repositories housing the manifests, docker-compose files, and scripts that facilitate most of my deployments. You can locate them here:
