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🌱 Check out my pins for projects I am currently working on or actively commit to
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🌐 Personal website 🖥️ Official
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⚡ Hobbies Learning new things, breaking and fixing things in my home-lab, axe throwing, pocket knife collecting, 3D printing, pc gaming, watching sports, spending time with my family (Wife, Son, Dog, and Cat)
I run a small yet capable home-lab within my house, where I constantly experiment to learn new things.
Live status: the lab publishes its own status via a small collector + API I built (Traefik/AdGuard/Proxmox/k3s/ArgoCD → snapshot → status page). Details on the status page:
Here's a list of the equipment I currently have in my home-lab:
- Dell Optiplex 5000 PC
- Three Beelink Mini PCs
- Synology NAS (DS923+)
- eero6 router & mesh network
- TP-Link un-managed gig switch
- APC UPS Pro 1500VA
- Old HP Laptop
Within my home-lab, I run many open-source applications, tools, and services. Many of these are deployed within my k3s cluster, and some are deployed using podman or directly on a VM/LXC. I recently migrated several services over to dedicated LXC's using Proxmox Helper Scripts. Here are some other interesting details:
- I employ traefik as my reverse proxy for all components, including Kubernetes.
- I use authentik for authentication and authorization.
- To access my home lab from anywhere, I rely on tailscale as my VPN solution.
- I use k9s to help manage my k8s cluster.
- argocd serves as my gitops tool within the k3s cluster.
- I developed a custom deploy agent script to manage podman deployments through gitops. This script is available here.
- To handle secrets in my k8s cluster, I utilize vault and the argocd-vault-plugin to inject secrets as part of my gitops workflow.
- To handle secrets in my podman deployments, I utilize sops and age.
- For observability, I employ a combination of tools such as prometheus, grafana, loki, and alloy. Additionally, I rely on uptime-kuma to monitor the availability of my public facing services and websites. These are exposed to the internet using Cloudflare Tunnels. Finally, I created a simple tool called PingPulse to monitor the availability of internal services and emit prometheus metrics I alert on.
- To handle local DNS and ad-blocking, I rely on adguardhome. I use cloudflare as my DNS provider. I've also tried pi-hole and technitium, but I found adguardhome to be the simpliest for my needs.
- I use renovate to keep my dependencies and images up-to-date.
- I use crowdsec to safeguard all publicly facing servers from malicious attacks.
Apart from my home-lab, I have deployed multiple servers within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to serve various needs. 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 OpenTofu.
Here is a screenshot showing some of the applications that are currently deployed in my home-lab:
In the sreenshot above, I am using a tool called homepage to display all of my services in a single page.
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 operations. You can locate them here:
Lastly, I want to mention my dotfiles repository, which contains all of my configuration files for my shell across macOS, Linux, and even windows. I used a very powerful tool called chezmoi to manage these files. With chezmoi I am able to encrypt sensitive files, pull secrets from 1password, and use go templating to manage more complex configurations.