Homelab
Don’t be fooled, having a home server is really just hundreds of hours of badblocks.
I’ve been hard at work recently converting my architecture to support orchestrated deployments with multiple nodes. I haven’t quite achieved high-availability, and I’m not likely to take things that far. However, it has been an excellent journey to become more acquainted with Kubernetes.
Setup and usage are inspired by a homelab gitops template and the k8s-at-home community. You can find similar setups with the k8s at home search. Historical revisions of my homelab setup had rootless Podman containers deployed with ansible as systemd units. Prior to that, I used docker-compose to orchestrate containers on a single node.
Setup
Here have been some of my goals:
- Lots of self-hosted services
- Flux GitOps with this repository (cluster directory)
- Ansible node provisioning and K3s setup (Ansible roles and playbooks)
- Terraform DNS records (terraform)
- SOPS secrets stored in Git
- Renovate bot dependency updates
- WireGuard VPN pod gateway via paid service
- WireGuard VPN proxy hosted on VPS
- Cloudflared HTTP tunnel
- K8s gateway for local DNS resolution to cluster and NGINX ingress controller
- Both internal & external services with a service gateway
- OIDC authentication with LDAP
- Automatic Cloudflare DNS updates (ddns cronjob)
- MetalLB bare metal K8s network loadbalancing
- Calico CNI
- ZFS
- JBOD mergerfs union NFS with SnapRAID backup for low-touch media files (snapraid-runner cluster cronjob)
- Restic backups to remote and local buckets (backup namespace)
- go-task shorthand for useful commands (Taskfile and taskfiles)
Some questions
Hardware
I finally upgraded my media server chassis to a Supermicro CSE-826. For almost 7 years I was using a Node 804, which is popular among hobbyists because it fits 8x 3.5" drivers. I use old desktop hardware for this NAS and other nodes.
I used a widely-known and inexpensive method to add additional SATA storage via a Host Bus Adapter (HBA). I purchased a Dell Perc H310 a long while back. Mine did come from overseas, but it turned out to be legit. This video shows how it can be flashed to an LSI 9211-8i IT (it’s called IT mode; see also 1, 2).
Here are other recommended controllers.