Home-Infra

This is probably the last post on the home infra, at least one that I thought about from the start. I will perhaps write more if I come up with something, but probably the future ones will be less about the overall software stack and more about e.g. Lixie or some other hobby project that is related to the infra, and less about the composition of the infrastructure. Container types, recap - and their lifetime Types of containers: As noted in an earlier post about the architecture, the home router is running plain Debian stable, with 3 types of containers, all provisioned using pyinfra so I do not mess with them on the host itself: ...

I have used a lot of different messaging tools over the years, and some have stuck, others have not. Back in the days: IRC (90s, early 2000s) There was some sporadic use of e.g. talk for point-to-point chatting among users of UNIX hosts. I used to use IRC a lot, starting in the 90s. There were various subject matter channels of interest, and I was quite keen about it at the time. However, its usage petered off gradually. I think my last serious use of it was with erc (Emacs client) in conjunction with bitlbee (which provided bridging to some other IM things that were being used at the time). ...

I have made a point of backing up about anything I do for a long time. Why? (Especially automated) backup systems will eventually be helpful no matter what you do. Whether it is changing or deleting some file that you did not have under version control (oops), hardware going bad, software going bad, hardware getting lost.. I have had all of them, but I have still yet to lose significant amount of data once I started taking backups consistently. ...

During the new home router infra exercise, I also chose to set up as reasonable as possible (lightweight) observability stack for my use. The holy trinity is defined to be metrics, logs, and traces, but as I do not really do much that requires tracing I focused initially on the first two. This exercise occurred mostly in February. Software choices Visualization I chose to go with Grafana. I am very familiar with it, and there seems to be an ecosystem of third-party tools which replicate some of what Aiven had (e.g. dashboard backup/restore tooling, dashboard rewriter I wrote fingon/gg-grafana: Grafana dashboard sanitizer as I could not find something similar in the open world, and so on). ...

As discussed in earlier post, the hardware choice was ultimately simple given the requirements. Even top-level software choice (Linux running Debian) did not seem particularly hard, but then started the hard part: coming up with reasonable design for what to run there. The requirements (2023 November) As I had 2,5GB ethernet ports (finally), my main Mac and NAS had to be directly connected to the box I used to have separate 2,5GB point-to-point between the two, but using simply one port in each instead of two made management slightly simpler and less error prone ’Internet-facing’ part would need to be relatively static and not touching Debian directly at all (instead, something bit more hardened would be the first ingress point) Both rootful and rootless containers would be nice to have The more containers the merrier - at this point I foresaw about half dozen useful containers something firewall/router-y facing internet DNS ad blocker (e.g. adguard, or pi-hole) reverse proxy to handle HTTPS (from both inside home, as well as from the internet) using proper certificates (e.g. caddy, traefik) home assistant (for home visibility and automation) jellyfin (for media) Infrastructure as Code (IaC from now on) What I did not choose to use Proxmox ( https://www.proxmox.com/en/ ) seems like the toy of the hour in the enthusiast circles. I am not quite sure why; perhaps it is the GUI. But the combination of GUI driven material (mostly), as well as not particularly good IaC (no first-party Terraform support - at the time there is third-party one in Proxmox Provider - Terraform Registry) did not make it particularly tempting for me. And besides, I was mostly planning to use pyinfra anyway. ...

Background I have not yet gotten around to writing a proper description of what I am running at home these days, but now I am having a brief unscheduled interlude to rant about how modern software is configured and deployed, and how it applies to hobbyist or not so enterprise setups. Example software of note in my home This list isn’t comprehensive, but I am trying to get to a point by picking few examples from my home setup, roughly in the order of appearance to the environment. ...

Background and requirements I have been considering x86 based solutions for years. Ever since the 12th generation of Intel CPUs ( Alder Lake ) came out in 2021 I started to consider it seriously, but at least as of 2022 there was nothing on the market that fulfilled following requirements: enough CPU/GPU power to transcode 4k video if need be I wanted to get rid of separate HTPC cool enough to be passively cooled noise is not fun and I have ~fanless setup in my office (with exception of NAS and gaming PC, neither of which is most of the time running) at least 4x 2,5 gigabit ethernet ports I wanted to upgrade my home infra default from gigabit to 2,5 gigabit ports (and extra switch seemed unappealing at the time) At the time, the best possible option I could find out was Alder Lake-N based Intel N100 boxes, but they didn’t quite have the oomph (just 4 CPU cores) I wanted, and they were also reported to be quite hot. So I left the idea parked in 2022. The Chosen One is chosen (early October, 2023) We had some casual discussion on Aiven Slack channel sometime after summer of 2023 about home routers, and N305 cropped up. There had been large number of relatively recent (released within year) network devices using it, and it motivated me to go looking around the Amazon website for candidates after having read some reviews which stated that the devices were bit cooler than N100 based earlier models. ...

I have had some sort of computers for a long time. Those are not particularly interesting, and I do not see myself bothering to write anything about them. However, the actual networking and infrastructure part is interesting as I have had to deal with computer infrastructure in various workplaces over the years, and reflecting on how I have set up my home over time brings up some lessons I have learned. ...