Homelab Tour: Part One

I’m pretty proud of the homelab I’ve built over the past eight years or so and I thought it’s about time to show it off in better detail.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m running several services for myself and my family across multiple devices. While the home network includes a Raspberry Pi and an old HP laptop, I’d like to focus on the real workhorse of this homelab: the HP Proliant DL360 G7.

Even when I bought it used almost two years ago, it was over a decade old and still too much for what I needed. But holy smokes it was cheap at around $200. After adding a few SAS hard drives, I now have the following setup:

This hardware easily runs several Docker containers that organizes over 2 TB of media on our network-attached storage, a Minecraft server, self-hosted cloud service, and video sharing service.

All of this is maintained using Webmin and Portainer: the latter to manage Docker containers and the former to oversee statistics and updates for the entire system.

Docker runs the following services:

• Portainer
• Nextcloud
• PhotoPrism
• Jellyfin
• Owncast
• PeerTube
• Wireguard
• Nginx Proxy Manager

With Nextcloud and PhotoPrism I have been able to completely drop Google Drive and Google Photos, each of which I used since at least 2011. Jellyfin has organized over 600 movies and TV shows we’ve collected on DVD and Blu-Ray, while Owncast and PeerTube give us fediverse alternatives to YouTube.

All of these services are fantastic, but for the past year I’ve been using Wireguard to securely tunnel into my network to use them since I didn’t want to expose those ports to the internet. But in recent weeks, Nginx Proxy Manager has allowed me to safely point all of them to a domain I bought for $12 per year.

Now I’m able to share files, photo albums, and videos with extended friends and family safely and without relying on “free” 3rd-party services. Because how free can they really be?

An important part of this section of my home network is at the bottom of the rack: a APC uninterruptible power supply. With the included data cable, the apcupsd daemon and a Webmin module, the entire system not only knows when the power goes out but will also turn itself off after about 20 minutes.

And because it’s an enterprise server, it reboots when power is restored.

In upcoming posts during #blogmonth I’ll highlight other parts of my home network that I use on a daily basis. Perhaps I’ll even venture in to the step-by-step methods I had to take to tie all of this stuff together.