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174 lines
7.1 KiB
Markdown
174 lines
7.1 KiB
Markdown
# An Opinionated Guide to Home Labbing: from Hardware to Software
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## Abstract
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Between increasingly required subscriptions, privacy terms changing overnight,
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and the difficulty of downloading your own data, it often feels like we rent our
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digital lives rather than own them. We'll walk you through hardware selection,
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the tools you'll need, the operating systems you'll install, and the software
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you might want to support for your homelab. We'll share our experience with our
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own variety of hardware, which ranges from tiny Raspberry Pis to mid-size laptop
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motherboards to overkill Threadripper servers. We'll talk about the operating
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systems we use and which ones have found the most stability and longevity in our
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deployments while comparing them to other homelab operating systems. We'll cover
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common homelab use-cases like media servers, Git servers, network storage, and
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local AI tooling. We'll also talk about safety and maintenance so you can weigh
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the choice of cutting the cloud cord properly. By the end of this talk you'll have a
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starting point for your own homelab journey, and maybe even a grocery list.
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Alex Oladele is a senior software engineer at Red Hat, working on Ansible Galaxy
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as part of the Ansible Automation Platform. He is a member of Black Python Devs
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and speaks at conferences about compassionate culture, Python, and practical
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engineering skills. He is passionate about mentoring and creating safe,
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inclusive spaces in tech. Outside of work, he builds silly side projects and
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runs a homelab he is very proud of
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Reese is DIY technology enthusiast with a passion for projects that make things
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easy. He's been working in development since 2017 with experience in risk,
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scripting automation, full stack web development, container infrastructure, amd
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homelab server hardware. He has a passion for mentoring, but even more of a
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passion for sharing the new tech he found last week with anyone who will listen.
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Currently, he leads the agentic vulnerability management team at Hungtington
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Bank.
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## Structure
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"I'm lazy, I don't want my family to kill me, and it works"
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1. I want this in my house
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2. I want to connect outside my house
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3. I want my friends to connect
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4. I don't want this to go down
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5. I want to recover if there's an error
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6. My server died, what now?
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## Thoughts
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Give 2 ideas per section. First for "I can't let this break my family will kill
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me". Second for "I have an understanding partner who is my cat and won't care."
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## Story driven presentation
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I have decided to make a strong home server. Where do I even start?
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Overarching theme:
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- This is about privacy, control, and stability
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- This is not about saving money
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- This is not about keeping up with the bleeding edge of the industry
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- (Both of these things might happen though, and that's great when it does)
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1. Hardware: you find a box (old laptop, rpi) you're set.
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- Reese
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- Framework 13 motherboard for experiments, QA, Forgejo/Gitea runners, `experimental.reeseapps.com`
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- Raspberry pi for home assistant
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- Threadripper 3000 series with a bunch of disks for main apps
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- framework desktop for local AI
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- Alex
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- "Gaming PC Foundation": 5950x + ddr4 64GB ram (before memory shortage)
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- Framework motherboard
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- Raspberry pi cluster
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2. I'm a little familiar with linux but what do I install on that hardware?
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- Alex: Truenas, Raspberry Pi OS
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- Reese: Address the proxmox shaped elephant in the room, Fedora, Alma Linux, cloud init
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3. What does your homelab maintenance toolbox look like? What toolkit do you
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open to work on your homelab? What do you bring to the table to start
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tinkering?
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- Reese: btop, podman, uv, yarn, pi.dev, borg backup, distrobox (talk about misconceptions like bash history preservation)
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- AI in the homelab, safety, security, privacy
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- Discuss the progression: chat bots -> harnesses -> agentic integration
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- Alex: truenas catalog, ansible, opencode
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- Discuss security in your tooling like setting wait periods before yarn installing
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- mention uv acquisition
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- Building custom apps with AI
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4. So you want to launch some containers
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- We dislike docker compose
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- Truenas apps
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- quadlets + podman
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- kubernetes (k3s) and its downsides
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5. When to use VMs
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- An extra layer of isolation
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- Easier networking
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- Simpler to prevent resource exhaustion
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- Talk about "right-sizing": Every VM gets 2GB ram and 2cpu cores to start. On a 32GB system, assuming 4GB for the host, that creates 14 VM "slots".
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- Alma Linux 10 takes up about 450MB at boot with nothing installed
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- Double the memory when resource exhaustion happens
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6. I want to install a new app while I'm at friend's house
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- Truenas web portal (app page, both official and community) + tailscale
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- VPN and I need access to my computer
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7. I want to check my server status on my phone (updates, disks, memory pressure, error logs, services running)
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- Truenas web interface
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- Cockpit web interface
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8. I want to add more storage
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- Truenas ZFS storage pools
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- BTRFS pools
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9. I want to install a new alpha app without much support
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- Truenas custom docker compose images
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- Fedora clone and run (in a VM for style)
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10. I want to backup my photos
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- Google Photos: don't use git, images aren't meant for git
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- **Immich, with backups (tell stories about losing my image data)**
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11. I want a local copy of my code
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- Github
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- Gitea/Gitlab (talk about that transition)
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- Forgejo
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12. I want private document editing
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- Google drive, Obsidian (forces use of markdown as my standard)
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- VSCode + pandoc (commit markdown files as your documents)
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- Nextcloud (Collabora)
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13. I want a local, offline LLMs
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- llama.cpp is great, but has a very high learning curve
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- Ollama has pitfalls
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- You don't know which model you're downloading
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- Model inference is not optimized
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14. I want to watch media I own
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- Plex - I know that ruffles some jimmies. Give example: add letterbox support into Plex.
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- Jellyfin if you're cheap
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15. I want to know when something goes wrong
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- Uptime Kuma!
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- NTFY
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- N8N
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- Truenas sending emails if there's an error
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- Fedora requires a custom solution
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16. I want "reasonable availability"
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- Truenas hits 90%+ availability. Updates take it down for reboot (5-10
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minutes). Disk failure requires full shutdown, disk swap, and rebuild.
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This could be half a day.
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- Fedora hits 90%+ availability. Updates take it down for reboot (<1 min).
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Disk failures can be ignored by rebalancing. Disk failures still require
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full shutdown and resilver. This can take half a day.
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17. I want to automate my house
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- Home Assistant (raspberry pi or green)
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18. I want backups of all my data
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- No backups is an option
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- Local weekly backups to usb drives via Truenas data replication
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- Borg backup via CLI or Pika.
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- Full disk backups, app directory backups, hybrid model
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- Backblaze and S3 integration for Truenas
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- 3 copies of your data, 2 different media, 1 off site.
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1. I want a private VPN
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- Tailscale, moved from wifiman, also moved from pivpn
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- unifi wireguard server, rawdog wireguard on a pi |