Besides running up my electricity bill, what else is this good for? What am I doing with all this? Do I need it all? Can I scale down? Hopefully, I will answer some of these questions.
Do I need it all? YES! Why? Because I want it all. That’s the biggest reason any of us have a homelab. I don’t care what others think — I like what I like and this is it. I don’t want a bunch of SFF servers. I don’t want ONE insanely configured server. I love my homelab. That’s the biggest reason why I have it. Not to brag, not to show off, but because I want it and it’s what I enjoy. I don’t drink, or have any other hobbies.
What do I do with it? I’ll start with the basics, what we all are probably doing. Of course, I have my Plex server and all the other apps that go along with a media server (the ‘arrs, Overseerr, etc). But Plex (and Kodi) are the *only* ways my family watches anything on TV. We do not have any streaming services (well, take that back. We have Discovery Plus, but that’s an old subscription that we’re not paying for, provided via our cellular provider). We have an OTA setup with a TV Tuner to pick up local stations (man, I was sick when Locast was shutdown). I even have ErasTV setup for other “channels” to mimic what they were used too. At any given time I have on average 11 streams going. As I will talk about later, and throughout these posts, multiple members of my family use the services as well.
My family has completely cut our use of cloud services like Google, iCloud, etc. I have a MDM deployed which keeps track of all our mobile devices. We use Immich for photos. Yes, I know it’s not “production” ready, but it has been rock solid for us, and before we do any updates I test fully. We lock both the app and server version until we certify the next version. Our certification process is simple — deploy the next version pointed at a test database, and make sure all features work. Test for a few days, if no problem, then migrate all.
We use things like Firefly for finance management. Little known feature it “supports an unlimited amount of users, who all have their own financial administration, completely separated from other users” , and can use my SSO. Each family members house has a wireguard VPN session back to the homelab. Each house has a pfSense firewall and certain traffic goes over it. Each household has the same wireless gear and is managed here as well.
We run our own email server for all the families, which includes WebMail, Calendar, and other Collaboration tools. I also run some groupware software for the few family businesses that are run from this.
Speaking of family businesses… I won’t go into too much detail about the specifics of them, but we use things like InvoiceNinja, OrangeHRM, Rocket.Chat. Mobile devices are managed by an MDM (Mobile Device Manager), which allows us to track, lock, wipe, etc devices. (We also use the same software for our personal devices, managed by a separate MDM server.
There’s a lot of open source software used here, and by self-hosting, they are saving a lot of money yearly. Because of that, the businesses do donate and contribute to the various projects. There is also some commercial software, software that there was no real viable open-source solution. There are also a few subscription services, like for DID numbers for those businesses with 3CX for Phone Services (Running multiple instances, since really can’t run multiple companies on one instance.)
Of course have Home Assistant and Frigate going, using a Coral TPU. Since most of my family members who use the homelab to manage their households, I am looking at running all instances here, but have to look into how much latency and how it will affect everything. Plus a lot of other stuff. Right now, each has their own HA running, and everything just syncs here.
The entire homelab inventory (as well as my entire household, and other households) are kept in Snipe-IT. If you do not have an inventory system, something that keeps track of all your SN, etc, I highly encourage you to get one. Every device in my home that has a serial number, is entered into the database. As well as vendors, prices, licenses, etc. Makes it really easy to provide an itemized inventory for insurance purposes. Each household is setup as a separate “Company” with it’s own admins. Snipe-IT also integrated with my SSO (I created the Integration guide for authentik here).
I use phpIPAM to manage IP addresses. This is integrated with PowerDNS, which I run for as my internal DNS server. Netbox is the complete source of truth for my network. As I’ve said, authentik is my iDP. LibreNMS. Skyline for logs (vmware), sexigraf, Promtail/Loki/Grafana, Prometheus, etc. Since I run production workloads, monitoring and notification are important.
I have GitLab and Jenkins running for CI. I do some software development, and they are used for a few other things as well. Oh, can’t forget Bitwarden.
Maybe I need to just make a post listing all the software in use. But for now, I’m going to bed 🙂
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