Homelab

Sysadmin, but like, cool

# What's a homelab? Basically a bunch of servers hanging out in your house not paying rent

## What does it do? Anything a server will do for you! - Block ads - Serve media - Run a VPN - Backups photos - Foot you with a big enegry bill

/r/homelab setups

/r/homelab... somethings

## The gist Homelabs are a hobby, generally one that costs you a decent chunk of money but they certainly don't have to. People use them to improve their sysadmin skills, play with new software, have local backups of everyting, etc. A homelab is whatever you make it.

## When did I start? Unofficially I started homelab-type stuff in high school. I hosted a Minecraft server and a network drive for my friends to use over Hamachi.

My friends liked to make music so the drive was used for that, movies, games, etc.

The drive, in all its glory.

That stayed pretty consistent for a long time with the occasional server hosted in AWS or GCP for game servers I didn't want running 24/7 in my house. I didn't hear the word "homelab" until a few months ago.

## My setup - 3 Raspberry Pi 4s - Unmanaged network switch - Router (not UniFi, shame) - TV Stuff - HDMI Switch - Steam Link - Lots of controllers/chargers

## Setup The first Pi took me a day to setup Pihole/Plex/etc on. Once I bought a couple more it took me a couple weekends to get all my software to a state where it can be auto-installed on a new Pi. https://github.com/colwynmyself/ansible https://github.com/colwynmyself/pi_config

# Software - Pihole - DNS based adblocking - Unbound - resursive DNS lookups, used with Pihole - Plex - Media server - Wireguard - VPN client (eventually server) - Netdata - System monitoring - Assorted other stuff

Pihole

Netdata

Plex

## Todo - NAS - Dedicated transcoding/Plex machine - Automatic updates - Public VPN - Kubernetes cluster (should replace a lot of existing components)

## Getting Started Start small. Use an old laptop or buy a Raspberry Pi to see if you find value in setting up servers at your home. I've barely scratched the surface and I've spent about $500 on various hardware. Not to mention the (low) power draw and noise from fans.

## Links - Raspberry Pi: https://www.raspberrypi.org/ - Pihole: https://pi-hole.net/ - Plex: https://www.plex.tv/ - Netdata: https://github.com/netdata/netdata - Unbound: https://nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/ - Wireguard: https://www.wireguard.com/