Introduction

I want to start writing about my homelab and this first post can be a short introduction to how I got into homelabbing and a review of my current hardware. I'll hopefully write about the evolution of my homelab to get to this current point and then start writing about updates as new things hit the lab.

The Journey

Applications | Pi-Hole

I started with a pi-hole appliance running on a pi-0 I had lying around. So, a little introduction into SSH and foreign operating systems (I was loosely familiar with Linux and so Raspbian wasn't a huge deal to start with) and then you could just install pi-hole. After installing it I got to learn a little bit about networking, DNS, DHCP, etc. all from just exploring and trying out the features of pi-hole.

Hardware

From there I happened to come into a few computers kind of for free that a church was recycling and so now with new-to-me x86 hardware and armed with a tiny bit of docker experience at work - I thought "well I wonder if I could run pi-hole in docker on a Linux machine?" and that opened the door to running other things in docker.

Applications | Free-NAS

I quickly decided I wanted a NAS after talking with a friend at work, and one of those computers that I inherited was the perfect target for Freenas by iX systems (Freenas has since morphed into a few things - primarily TrueNAS Core for the homelabber). That got me somewhat familiar with jails (which is a BSD concept as FreeNAS was based on FreeBSD, not Linux) and running containers in different ways and then I decided I wanted Linux so I rebuilt with Ubuntu.

Current Homelab Setup

Ad blocking | Pi-Hole

Hardware: pi-3

I have a Raspberry Pi 3 hardwired in that is running pi-hole so that's been a part of my infrastructure now for a long time.

Router | OPNSense

My router is an old Optiplex SFF 5060 I got from Amazon for less than $100. So I'm running a x86 system for my router with OpenSense on it. Just seemed it to be another home lab standard and I'd like to someday bring pi-hole over there or use AdGuard or integrate those two things maybe a little bit more completely but right now they are mostly separate.

Networking | VLANs

There's a managed switch in there for some VLAN tomfoolery for my cameras and an IOT network type of a thing.

Networking | VPN | Tailscale

They're on tailscale as well so my DNS happens over tailscale.

My Desktop

My daily-driver desktop is somewhat apart of my homelab now as I have a 3090 in there with 20 GB of VRAM so I can run some heavier LLMs for self-hosted AI workloads. Everything in that space runs in a container and then I manage docker containers with compose stacks and portainer for visibility.

Applications

Some of the apps I run here are ollama, open-webui, automatic1111's stable diffusion webui, whisper-webui

NAS / Server

At the moment I am managing containers using Docker Compose stacks. Many applications have their own stack but then I also have stacks of many applications. The Compose files are all organized by host and they're in git and I use GitHub as my main get back and remote storage.

Applications

There are currently 74 containers running on my server, I will not list them all but here's some highlights:

• traefik
• portainer
• nextcloud
• jellyfin
• *arr stack
• code-server
• kanboard

I regularly spin up compose stacks to try new things as I hear about them in newsletters and such - I will be making an attempt to write about them more frequently in a homelabbing series