Automating my Homelab with Ansible

Homelabs can be great fun. But how do you take care of device configuration, backups, testing, patching, upgrades, and hardware replacement?
Well, I use Ansible wherever I can to make sure the boring parts of homelab ownership are automated. In this presentation, originally delivered at AnsibleFest 2022 in Chicago, I'll give a tour of my homelab and talk about how I automate parts of my Homelab using Ansible.
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Homelab equipment (some links are affiliate links):
- StarTech.com 25U open frame rack: amzn.to/3SdJdb1
- Neat Patch 2U Cable management unit: amzn.to/3SeorIf
- TRENDnet 24-port keystone patch panel: amzn.to/3ScFfzg
- TRENDnet shielded RJ45 keystone jacks: amzn.to/3Tkt8le
- Monoprice Cat6A SlimRun patch cables: amzn.to/3s6ZW55
- QNAP 20-port PoE++ 10 Gbps and 2.5 Gbps switch: amzn.to/3TbIFDv
- MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+IN 10 Gbps Cloud Router Switch: amzn.to/3TwgGyf
- Home Assistant Yellow: www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa...
- ASUSTOR Lockerstor 6 Gen2 AS6706T NAS: amzn.to/3EQF7Cm
- ASUSTOR Lockerstor 4 AS6604T NAS: amzn.to/3eEXvnh
- 45Drives Storinator XL60: www.45drives.com/products/sto...
- MyElectronics.nl Mac Studio rack: www.myelectronics.nl/us/mac-s...
- NavePoint 2U rack drawer: amzn.to/3g82ugq
- Tripp Lite Isobar 12-outlet rack PDU: amzn.to/3SeRpHI
Mentioned in this video:
- Ansible for DevOps: www.ansiblefordevops.com
- Get a free ebook copy! www.jeffgeerling.com/ansible-...
- Rack upgrade video with my Dad: • Massive Rack Upgrade f...
- PetaPi - Petabyte Raspberry Pi: • The Petabyte Pi Project
- Internet Monitoring Pi: • Your ISP is lying! Mon...
- All-SSD Edit NAS build: • Scrapyard Server: Fast...
- Monitoring my ASUS router with Prometheus and Grafana: www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/202...
- Backup Pi / My Backup Plan: github.com/geerlingguy/my-bac...
- Drupal Pi: github.com/geerlingguy/drupal-pi
- Raspberry Pi Dramble cluster: pidramble.com
- Raspberry Pi NVR (Network Video Recorder): github.com/geerlingguy/pi-nvr
- Pi-VPN: pivpn.io
- Mac Development Ansible Playbook: github.com/geerlingguy/mac-de...
- Pi Router: github.com/geerlingguy/pi-router
#homelab #ansible
Contents:
00:00 - Homelabs
00:26 - My homelab
02:06 - Three purposes
02:40 - "I'll never fill up this rack"
04:58 - What's in my rack?
07:32 - No manual drudgery
08:41 - Ansible projects
11:09 - Much to do
12:24 - Why we homelab

[@eiadurrahman]

My home lab is just a bucket full of things I salvaged from e-waste

[@JeffGeerling]

The most economical approach! Just watch the power consumption ;)

[@susugar3338]

Same here: 30$ mini ITX for pfSense, 60$ mini ITX for Home Assistant, 0.5$ "broken" NVR for security camera 😊

[@queenannsrevenge100]

I really want to start diving into a home lab but it is definitely a hard sell for the wife with the whining servers and the hvac additions 😄 not to mention I have pets and pet hair and dander are the mortal enemies of servers…

[@eiadurrahman]

@@JeffGeerling thanks

[@JeffGeerling]

@@queenannsrevenge100 Heh, that is part of running a homelab!

[@Necrox894]

You actually made me to make a homelab. Currently have a old pc serving as a nas and a raspberry pi 3 running pi-hole

[@JeffGeerling]

That's probably the best and most common way to start a homelab! Just watch out... soon you might end up with like 10 servers and a full rack haha. But really, for most people a 'server' (which is usually just a PC) with storage, and a device that can manage DNS/ad blocking, is about perfect for home use!

[@vaisakhkm783]

@@JeffGeerling me too, currently electricity bill is keeping me down... so i only have a raspberry pi 4 with a harddrive(actually that was my main system for a whole year, so you know i don't want my father to suffer with huge bills).... so my side job as support engg.. and collage sucking all time, but i managed to afford a computer ... :) so for now i am limited to raspberry pi...

[@williamhenderson9855]

And then it starts.... like if you know what I am talking about

[@TECHNDJ]

I have converted my HPC (for gaming and productivity) into a proxmox server now have couple of them serving a lot like a real Data centre lol, hope it scales up even after I leave to States

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

0:11 Every home lab has a story. It was DNS.

[@Alex-oh5rt]

it’s always DNS

[@vaisakhkm783]

mine was DNS :')

[@doublea47]

it was DNS, now it's everything

[@musicjewell9329]

Heh

[@Lucky-pf1io]

Mine was media server. Who else?

[@crashtfa]

Ansible for home lab was an amazing talk, thanks for coming!

[@JeffGeerling]

Glad you liked it!

[@thij_zert]

1:30 the best Jeff Gerling content I've seen so far :)

[@JeffGeerling]

wheeeee!

[@roguethinker6284]

There.s nothing finer than to find someone who loves what they do and make it contagious.

[@Mr402TA]

You get more awesome every video I watch lol. Good thing you have a significant other that doesn't choke out that creativity 👍

[@PhilipSHempel]

Your presentation was awesome at Ansiblefest! Thanks for taking the time to do this. It was great meeting you and hope to have the opportunity to meet again!

[@JeffGeerling]

Good to meet you too!

[@Vhbaske]

Your father looks so young! I lost mine in 1997, spend all the time you can have with him, while he is with you.

[@cooki3cutt3r13]

Sir, you discussed my home lab journey word for word. Even the part about the electric bill, lol. also, like I tell all my friends, " my greatest fear is, when I die my wife will sell my network equipment for the price I told her I bought it for." lol

[@ismascarade]

I got the motivation to make a homelab now

[@Kube4x]

Love seeing your dad participate in your projects. Makes me wish I had a cool dad lol

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Amazing video! Your homelab content got me interested in learning Ansible and building my own homelab

[@WobblycogsUk]

Every time you make a video I kick myself for not having got around to setting up my home lab, it's great, please keep it up.

[@JeffGeerling]

Just give yourself a gentle slap or something, kicking yourself sounds like it might hurt!

[@A77ick]

I started off with a Raspberry Pi running OMV, and made a Plex NAS. Then after discovering You, Network Chuck, RAID Owl, Techno Tim, and Lawrence Systems I've got an Optiplex w/Pfsense, and an old gaming PC w/ Proxmox VM w/TrueNAS Scale, Pi-hole, Plex, and currently working on Ansible scripts for upkeep. I followed your internet-pi tutorial and have a visualization of Comcast screwing me. I have spent way too much money, but it's still so much fun to play pretend as a Sys-admin! Thank you.

[@Smytjf11]

Hope you had a good time in Chicago! I can't imagine going there on purpose! -STL 😅

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh, I made sure to get a hot dog with ketchup!

[@MarcJennings]

I am just getting started with Ansible, and your 101 series has been great. I'm just starting splitting out into roles since a lot of my servers are different yet related.

[@muddyexport5639]

Keep on keeping on Geerling! Looking forward, as always, to the next installment.

[@PhoeniXfromNL]

thanks a bunch for your videos Jeff, my homelab tends to be my old gaming system retiring to a proxmox setup with pihole and file servers for my backups. love the content ^^

[@rjramalho]

Guys and videos like yours made me create my own homelab. I am scaling down because of energy bills but it's a great experience, and you learn a lot from doing it.

[@TK-vh5pv]

Love your videos! Wish you all the success. Please keep up the videos, they are fantastic!

[@Richardj410]

Thanks Jeff, makes me feel better about my collection of hardware and computers. Always learning something new.

[@edwardvanhazendonk]

Thanks for sharing Jeff! Homelab is around EdgerouterX, Proxmox on a HP EliteDesk, storage on a Synology NAS, lot's of VMs, LXCs etc, some IoT. And yes, Ansible to automate things and have stuff done correctly.

[@andre-le-bone-aparte]

@07:26 - Mullet Rack: Business in the front... PARTY in the back!

[@reecepeart]

It’s funny how your discoveries especially about equipment not fitting in the rack and getting a family member to help you build your first deep server rack resonates with me 😂

[@ve2dmn]

Thanks for the selfie (and book code) at Ansiblefest. I hope you had a great time with the conference.

[@Churchill250267]

You're looking a lot brighter Jeff! Hope you're well. Nice video, I'm now suffering from "Home Lab" envy! I work from home but have all my kit just lying around the office - I need to organise! All the very best from the UK!

[@phoenixbird09]

Thank you!!! I use your playbooks all the time. You deserve a medal! Thank you for all your work!

[@JeffGeerling]

🎖 Thanks!

[@toddblanchard7765]

You have convinced me to try Ansible. Thanks for the video.

[@AngadSodhi]

Such a relatable video! My setup currently includes 1 Rpi for OMV (pihole, wireguard, some internal websites), 1 Rpi for Home Assistant, 1 Synology NAS with Plex and 1 custom PC for BlueIris NVR. Going to mount stuff on plywood this weekend :D :D Now I just need to ensure my wife never sees this video :P

[@jleuthardt]

you made me make a homelab. i now have an old pc running an 11tb nas, a pi3 running home assistant, a pi4 running octoprint, and another pi3 running a handful of docker containers.

[@Radek125]

You are very relatable. I think that's the key part of your success. Thanks

[@Mr_Kirk_]

Good stuff Jeff. Inspiring and useful.

[@dragonrider6875]

I have Dell 620 running Proxmox, a Pi 4, 2009 i-Mac, 2017 MacBook pro, Dell laptop, and a Unifi network, I run manually. All of my gear can be used. I have rebuilt my Pi multiple times and love it. I really want several blade Pi's to use.

[@ArifKamaruzaman]

there are several things that makes happy. Some of them are my homelab, servers at work, games, and your videos.

[@Catge]

Very insightful Jeff!

[@mikemegalodon2114]

So inspiring, a video of great energy!

[@johnsummers7389]

Great video. Love the projects and review. I too live in STL area.

[@vthrash7832]

Congrats!! I love Ansible too, mainly cus i'm lazy, so I started developing playbooks for my job. I automated half of my work for about a year and then i told my company, they loved it too. SO now I'm "the ansible guy". I got your book too! great for reference and examples

[@ehh54]

Thanks to you and your book i am now working full time with ansible :)

[@canoozie]

I've had many homelabs over the years, first one was just a few access points and a switch, three computers I was using to learn how to set up what would eventually become the ISP I launched. These days, it's mostly about supporting my work, taking ownership of my data and responsibility for it. I have an 18U rack it's all in, a leaf switch (poe) at the top, patch panel below, an aggreagion switch below that, another patch panel below that. Below all that is a router, a 1U nas, 2U epyc virtualization system. Bottom of the rack has a ups, back of the rack a PDU, and a shelf that holds a couple of NUC-sized computers, that act as two other nodes in my proxmox HA cluster, one runs docker containers too via nomad. Anyway, I'm less about the toys, but there's always something to improve, and scripting things is on my list.

[@wchorski]

If you switch to the Home Assistant Supervised Install you could unlock the full potential of that CM4 inside. or run the "Terminal" Home Assistant Integration and set up SSH keys internally. That should give you some control like updating etc.

[@thezy2]

Jeff, fellow IT St. Louisan here. I focus largely in MDM, Infrastructure (Azure & On-prem), and Security within Microsoft's land. I've tried several times to get into KZbin but can't seem to get things going. Your videos are both fun, informational, and inspiring. Keep these up, I love watching them as a lot of this is new to me and the pursuit of knowledge has always been my thing. If you do end seeing this, I'd love to get your expertise on starting in the YT space as an IT professional and would love to pick your brain on how you make videos both entertaining and informational! I greatly enjoy all the videos you make and have been following you for a while now! You're awesome and stay awesome!

[@kevindawe911]

Great vid as always Jeff. I really need to get your Ansible book, maybe I'll buy it as a Christmas present for myself. Already waiting in anticipation for your next video.

[@handsomestrangr]

I just moved from a job as a systems admin to a solutions architect which has been awesome, but my new job does not really maintain well practice environments so I picked up an HP dl380p gen 8 server for a couple hundred bucks, threw 128gb of ram in it and grabbed a couple SSD's for the SFF bays. This sits on top of a rack mount UPS I got a couple years ago. Moving up the rack is a Unifi Dream Machine SE, a separate 4u rack mount case with another server for games, then a drawer for random important files since it locks, and then room for another shelf. It is all installed in a 12u rack my dad built for me out of wood with locking front and back doors and cable runs out the bottom. It also has 4 holes for case fans to draw air out the top to keep the whole thing cool and well ventilated. It also helps keep the noise down to just the corsair case fans running full tilt all the time. Works for me and keeps it all contained for the wife approval factor. The only thing visible outside the thing is my Unifi Flex HD AP that I use for my home wifi. I currently use my hp for work related projects and have trueNAS core installed in a VM on it but I am looking into getting a NAS and wanted to ask about your experience with AsusTor? They seem like a pretty good option but I haven't seen a lot about them compared to somebody like Synology.

[@anon_y_mousse]

I'd love to see a picture of that rack. I've been wanting to build a computer case out of wood, if I ever get the time, but a whole 12U rack sounds pretty awesome.

[@warp00009]

You inspired me! Over the last couple of days I was able to install Ansible on Windows (it works surprisingly well using Cygwin) and write some playlist scripts to update the installed software on my Raspberry Pi's and backup Minix computers (all running slightly different flavors of Ubuntu). It took a lot of trial and error to finally get everything to work as much of the online documentation suffers from the general Unix/Linux problem, providing examples of niche special cases but with little or no attention to showing general principles and syntax options. I found debugging my scripts a real challenge since the errors never showed you exactly what the Ansible modules were attempting to execute at all. Never could get the "debug" stuff to work for me at all. Still, it's working and should save me some time down the road! Now if I could figure out everything I've forgotten about Docker, to see if I can use that for anything too! Keep up the good work, your channel is always interesting!

[@pbartkus]

Thanks for the tour through the Geerling "data center."

[@NoFaceCobain]

Love stuff like this thanks man

[@temyraverdana6421]

Hi Jeff, a wonderful amazing video.

[@AustinEschweiler]

The idea of automating some of the mundane parts of labbing sound fun. I might have to check it all out!

[@JoeVSvolcano]

I use Ansible to manage all the server containers running my Pi4(8G) hypervisor (PiMox/ProxMox). Its super fun to tear down and rebuild my DNS server, Pihole, Presearch nodes, with ansible in seconds.

[@agent__k]

I hope you are well. I'm virtualising everything with xcp-ng. I7-8700T and 32Gb Ram can handle a lot of small footprint VM-s. ansible control host, docker host, omv, pihole, pivpn, and other linux distros for multiple reasons. I have even a windows 10 vm too with gpu passtrough. Raid, backup plans, ansible playbooks etc, I learned a lot from you. The ansible book is masterpice for beginners and not so beginners too. I saw the whole ansible youtube series twice :).

[@chuxxsss]

I hope you are feeling a little better mate. Have a wonderful weekend.

[@Daphoid]

In college my home lab was 6 tower PC's and a 3com switch, had monowall, a domain controller, all kinds of stuff. Then when I moved into a tiny apartment the noise of that stuff lasted about 3 months before the lady suggested I get rid of it. Moved all of the storage to a QNAP NAS and got a decent Asus router (based on WRT). I've added a few PI's since then - but haven't gone much beyond that. Some of it just doesn't make sense when it's just the 2 of us in a little apartment, it feels like overkill. But - I fully get why you and a lot of other folks love it. My primary hobbies are video games and music production so they take a lot of time that I suspect others would occupy with home lab stuff. Maybe someday when we get a house and I branch into more home automation stuff - the need (and space for) a small rack will grow. I will say, a lot of the web based stuff you do I've personally moved to AWS back when I was learning that for work, probably costs about the same in relation to your power bill in the end :)

[@davidbubble6863]

My humble homelab is just a Pi connected to 8 port Gigabit switch running dnsmasq for minimal ad block setup and IP provider. At the same time it also runs NFS as a quick and dirty way for other connected devices to access the storage on the Pi. Your setup is way better than me lol. Probably better than most of us.

[@JeffGeerling]

But your setup is probably about the most common-it's a great little setup that's already better than what 99% of the world has :)

[@davidbubble6863]

@@JeffGeerling yep this is the most common setup and works most of the time. Just enough to handle small work load from me. I have plans for home automation as well so my current setup might expand a bit in the future.

[@AxionSmurf]

I work on my home lab all the time too, and I agree wholemindedly that learning is fun. Mine mostly consists of 2S E5-2697V2s with 384GB of RAM and VMs in UNRAID and I've got nowhere near 200TB of storage, but they do pretty well despite being so old. I have two of those Mikrotik 10g SFP+ L3 switches. The only problem I've ever had with them is 10G over copper. I had to cap all the copper to 5G due to spikes in network reliability. Capped at 5G it's super smooth. With fiber there's been no issue with 10G.

[@RobertRidleyE]

I use anisble primarily for grabbing exports of all of my mikrotik devices. It is much easier than setting up scheduled email exports on each device or manually grabbing exports on each device.

[@JeffGeerling]

That's... actually a great idea, and I should just get that set up with my other backup jobs instead of trying to automate the configuration right away.

[@JoshWillcock]

I've had that book for years... Never knew it was you!

[@fedemtz6]

An official home assistant ansible integration would be pretty cool

[@davevq]

"And your significant other begins to wonder why the electric bill shot up so quick?" Had me rolling. Yup she noticed.

[@tigeroats913]

My lab is an old hp elite desk running windows, I have jellyfin running on it all the time, I'm planning on moving to truenas but not now, and a dell optiplex running as a Kodi box, and a pihole with my recursive dns address, it's really humble but I'm proud of it

[@EricMesa]

That was great, both the intro and why you need Ansible. I would love a more in depth video on how it's saving you time. I know I should be using Ansible for my homelab, VMs, and VPSes but I haven't figured out how it will help

[@gicknardner]

Recently went from a laptop and some rpi's to a rack with an 11th gen i3 running unraid and dockerizing everything. Home assistant docker was a small ordeal without the addon store, but ultimately I like it a lot more as I always found Home Assistant OS kind of mysterious.

[@thescandalchannel]

Do absolutly the same. HA is pretty easy in Unraid. I have a lot of dockers and around 80TB runing on a i3 9100, just the firewall has its own physical device. I just have a pi for my 3d-printers, but everything else runing on unraid, and a backup synology but just for data.

[@mm345-0]

You and your dad are hilarious together. Love the videos!

[@julianoalberto]

Your book is awesome.

[@MrBharathkumarraju]

man you inspire me a lot to learn new things

[@elabeddhahbi3301]

i hope you can make a separate series called ansible night once a week would be perfect

[@computer_freedom]

In the mid 70s my neighborhood friends would call my bedroom a lab, because of all the stuff in it. I made things like radio control using tones, directional electric eyes, voice activated circuits to monitor when I was away, and other devices. I got third honors in the CT science fair in my senior year, and a award for clarity from a newspaper covering the event. Since then I set up and sold computers, and even had a shop where kids could come and play online games on the computers. Today I am retired, but still have setup security camera systems on Linux using FTP for increased reliability and security, which I found out in my present home lab. I often look for a product to add to my setup, but when I can't find what I want, I make it myself. Two projects I am working on is a uninterruptible power supply that is reliable and long running for my server, and a remote storage for some of my sensitive data. I am not at the rack server yet, but I started with a used computer with a few drives. This became clear I wanted something faster and bigger. I then bought a case that can hold ten drives, which isn't full yet. My main computer can reboot three operating systems at a push of a button, and three more with a drive bay. I use this with another used computer to video capture this computer or the other one, when it involves reboots on videos. Security was always big with me, so I learned to open locks as a kid. Today I am self taught in computers, and have an interest in computer security. Encrypting drives is a big thing with me, and I can open them over the network, which means my server has encrypted drives on it. The server also displays three cameras on my security system on a 15 inch display in front of me, and below my main screen. The server is locked down so the display is in real time, but there is no way to use a keyboard or mouse on it in this configuration. We have more cameras on the system, and all of them can be displayed, but I select to display just the three. I get all kinds of surprised looks from delivery people, when I meet them at the door before they knock or when they select not to knock. I could go on,but I don't like long comments, and this is long enough.

[@-ColorMehJewish-]

I only hope to build a lab like this one day. So far, I have multiple shrines all over my house... and many parts waiting for a new home. Got a couple 24 port managed switches w/ fiber links, 2 x Pi4's (one's running my cam/basic storage NAS atm), a rack UPS and surge protector strip (mountable). Next I am eyeing up a 2U setup, but I'm leaning more towards customizing the layout b/c I do not really want the traditional server rack anymore. I've seen variants running nice air cooled Noctua setups on dual Xenon's and I'm leaning more towards that now. Anyway -- awesome setup. Thx for the ideas and info 👍

[@henry55430]

My home lab is an old Site Manager from a small town gas station (i5-3550s in an Intel dq77mk with 10gb ram) that I just stuffed as many hard drives in it as it had SATA ports. All recycled drives, from laptops to portable hard drives to desktop, they all store my "precious" *definitely legitimately obtained* files. My rpi runs the network pihole setup, and it's just a standard cable company modem combined with a TP-Link ax 1500. I plan to build my own router one day.

[@ARitzCracker]

Thank you! I've just started organizing all my data and devices into a proper "home lab" setup in a sorda hybrid-cloud architecture. (My main server/nas is actually a host for more specialized VMs) I was just thinking about how I could manage all my devices and VMs all in once place.

[@TaylorCohron]

Enjoyed your presentation at AnsibleFest! Hope you had a great time at the test of the conference and got to get into a lab! 🤣

[@dougparker-barnes1229]

What an awesome video Jeff, I've had stuff previously but never enough for a rack, I've been trying to setup a NAS and media centre for music but my skills on linux are zip comparatively. I have a couple of Pi's and a few old PC's I could easily use... One day...

[@wyohman00]

My home lab consists of Cisco, Meraki Wireless and many RPIs. I have a copy of your book and I'm starting with network device configuration and will move to RPI/Misc soon.

[@shoosh6398]

Just bought your book because of this video wish me luck on the ansible journey

[@JeffGeerling]

Good luck!

[@ToddWalton]

You should come to All Things Open one year, Jeff, and give a talk or just meet up with homelabbers here!

[@FlorianGT396]

I am also using Shinobi at home, and now also for some other buildings but currently looking into frigate and doubletake, because face detection is kinda fun. Before shinobi i was using zoneminder, but im happy with shinobi and some nice 4k cameras.

[@JeffGeerling]

I'm currently testing both Shinobi and Frigate-Shinobi so far was the easiest to get up and running on my Pi.

[@FlorianGT396]

@@JeffGeerling have a look at your github issue, i commented some info i collected.

[@LordApophis100]

As always great video, often looking at your repos/videos for inspiration for my own homelab. Just noticed you don't yet run a proper firewall? First thing I do is set the router to bridge mode and hook up my pfsense to handle everything. This allows me to properly separate my networks physically and virtually: running a dedicated IOT network/wifi without access to anything internal, separated management network etc. You can get some small, used Xeon-D Supermicros with 10G rather cheap now which are perfect for handling firewall/VPN/DNS blocking etc.

[@Mr76Pontiac]

My home lab stretches my moving four houses. It started in my parents basement when I was in high school, upgraded a machine and my old machine ended up being a server of some sort. BBS, or, file storage, or whatever. Too long ago to remember. I then moved out on my own with my now-wife and slowly picked up discarded hardware from customers when I worked at the mom/pop computer store, or purchased my own hardware brand new, and slowly brought PC towers home to get them to do different things. This was back in the Pentium 3 or 4 days? After that, I got a job where I'm at now (15 years ago) and I've taken some more of this companies discarded hardware and put them in my rack. 48-port GigE switch, a pair of routers (Which are decommed due to age and their crap'n the bed frequently) and a pair of Dell servers running ProxMox each. Total of nearly 256gig of RAM between the two. I've got a single Drobo as my NAS and everything hooks into it. I still have several decommed work machines as well that are just sitting here (Pretty powerful at that) which may end up being more ProxMox machines that I just stuff under the servers. The only thing I'm not doing is running any kind of monitoring what so ever. The internet drops more than any of the software or hardware. I've got to figure out how to get backups going, even if its taking down VMs to do a full on VM backup (I'm not switching away from ProxMox) and then bring it up, and Ansible could do it by talking to the ProxMox servers directly, or, maybe there's a plugin already. Don't know, haven't looked. The only "production" value thing I have is sitting on a couple of VMs that run pfSense (Easy enough to rebuild, but, wouldn't mind getting a regular backup of haProxy settings) and one VM in particular which controls my static-DHCP settings (DHCP grants IPs based on MAC addresses, and I control that via a custom build web interface that's in need of upgrading, so any ideas from you guys on how to manage DHCP addresses based on MACs, I'm all ears!). Looking forward to the next 20 years of hardware stuffs!

[@peterwalker5413]

Now I know why we really have a Pi shortage… Red shirt Jeff bought them all. 😂

[@norsk54472]

looking forward (soon? please?) to seeing your ansible files for your homelab, as I learn much from your examples. As for electricity, I run 99% off grid now, with the home lab consuming about 6 kwh per day, about 1/6th of my house electric consumption of 36 kwh per day

[@iam_zorex]

Awesome video. Thought of doing some automation for my homelab as well. I try to have as little hardware as possible. I ran a 4 port 2.5G x86 OPNsense, a NUC with Proxmox hosting VMs (pi-hole, grafana, game server, and nextcloud). I would suggest OPNSense or PFSense for your new router setup. Very flexible...

[@chromerims]

Thanks, Jeff. 👍 • desktop with bevy of fans • vintage rpi's and laptops • consumer grade, ancient and embarrassing • evaluating diy solutions for iSCSI jbod • SSDs, HDDs, USBs and uSD cards • sundry cloud

[@JeffGeerling]

Hehe I mean compared to many homelabbers, my ASUS router is also consumer grade and embarassing!

[@chromerims]

@@JeffGeerling Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.

[@samrjuliea]

My home lab had changed so much over the years. It started when a friend introduced me to Windows home server. Back then I had just finished a computer for my boys to use, making it the second computer in my house. The server started as just another desktop hiding in the corner and was still fine with the 4 network ports on my router. Years later I picked up my first managed switch as the server usage was overloading the consumer router. Now I have a full 42U rack, starting at the top with my ubiquity edge router POE, then a Cisco 48 port POE+ managed switch (this powers the access point, and the poe camera, soon to also power a pi timelaps project). A Dell 1U server as a Minecraft server. Then my main server crazy, HP DL580 G7 server, 2 12bay SAS expanders, and 1 25bay SAS expander. Then a series of UPS boxes to keep everything running.

[@alexlandherr]

My “home lab” has 1 Pi4B that runs an Onion Service (a Dark Web Website), 1 Pi Zero W that runs a desktop 7 segment clock, 1 Pi4B that runs my Pi-hole, and 2 Pi4B:s that function as hot spares. I also use my editing/programming/gaming rig as a Plex Server (media resides on external JBOD cabinet). There’s so many Gigabit Ethernet cables I’ve got 2 desktop switches.

[@tergkyit]

Amazing video.

[@hicalls]

Thanks for sharing

[@mrcrazyadd2]

Nethserver has been my network appliance for a few months after Arista bought Untangle. I like it more than anything else I've used and I'm looking to give it 4g if I can, too

[@YammyBoh7]

I got started with old laptop motherboards on wooden blocks. Ran various Linux operating systems for fun but nothing useful. A few years later I set up an unRAID server from an old gaming PC. Since then I have become way more proficient with Ubuntu and expect future instances based on ubuntu server running docker etc. Although unRAID will always have a place in my life because it just works when I'm busy but allows me to tinker and play when I have some time. When I have more money I plan to set up a full rack in a dedicated room with just I/O at my desk/entertainment areas. Love these "nerdy" vids for finding interesting new approaches or ideas.

[@JeffGeerling]

I also love hearing about other setups, there's almost always a little hack that I end up incorporating into my own setup!

[@rsaffi]

Hey Jeff! Long time follower here, but first time commenting. We have a rather similar homelab setup (in terms of bootstrapping things, observability, home automation etc) and there is one thing that I haven't yet tackled and that bothers me every day: centralized logging. Having to jump to various hosts to analyze logs is annoying. I have the technical knowledge to deploy even highly complex systems (I work as a DevOps Engineer) and indeed I have played with rsyslog, Loki and Graylog+ELK with the idea of accomplishing centralized logs, but none have really made me want to stick with them: they're either too cumbersome to setup and maintain or end up with an approach that isn't really helping with what I want/need. I of course grasp the difference of centralized log _storage_ versus centralized log indexing/processing/searching and realistically what I want to achieve is more towards the latter. To be able to have a single place I can jump into to search logs from my various servers, possibly/preferrably filtering by service, with a good granularity of what I ship from each host. I'm always keeping an eye on /r/homelab and /r/selfhosted but haven't yet made my peace with what to go with. Have you ever put any thought into this and if so, what have you been considering to use to solve this? I am *big* on open-source and would rather stick to an open-source project if possible. Sorry for the long message and thanks in advance for taking the time to read it! Also thanks a lot for the great content you create and share! I'm always happy when there's a notification on my phone telling me you've uploaded a new video! Keep up the amazing work you do! All the best!

[@BlueYeuda]

Excellent backup strategy to have 2 copies - I suggest to move one NAS to a different physical place. The backup NAS doesn't need fast connection. Imagine a fire for example where at the current solution both of them will lose all data.

[@JeffGeerling]

Check out my backup video (link in description)-in addition to the two on-site NASes I have a full 3rd backup on Amazon Glacier (so offline-ish but very remote).

[@TheJimsokoloff]

Most condensate pumps have a safety switch that you can run the AC thermostat call circuit through, such that if the safety switch is triggered, it will cut out the AC before it floods.

[@ostapkurtash6359]

Gaddamn at some point I thought you were describing me with your server progress needs. I even have the same ax86U router ahah

[@BradRichardson0]

I've loved my Firewalla Purple, best router by far I've ever had with amazing performance/stability and a ton of features. The WAN failover using the Purple's built-in Wi-Fi is flawless. Check them out!

[@Timelord47]

My homelab is a modest RockPro64 with 2 HD attached, running AdGuard, Docker, Plex, and OpenMediaVault, is a modest homelab that I was able to put together in Uruguay, due the high cost of those pieces of tech here...

[@pinaz993]

If you want to automate a RouterOS device through the command-line (and thus through Ansible), take a look at scripts. Unless I'm very much mistaken, scripting is available to all RouterOS device. If not, just use the CLI on one device to SSH into the router with a keyfile. You should be able to make it so that the key is only usable from a specific MAC address behind your NAT/PAT or link local.

[@grahammales]

I built a router on CentOS (using iptables, dnsmasq, quagga and tinc) on an Intel N3160 mini pc. Have the same setup at my parents house and work and use tinc as a mesh vpn to connect everything together. Have a storage server at each house and have the data rsync'd nightly to a backup drive at each house.

[@albertocalore2414]

My lab is composed as follows: -Raspberry Pi 4 2gb with Pihole, Home assistant, Tailscale node and some backup script (64bit raspberry os, since last month!) -A Synology 2 bays Nas, with a lot of important documents and photos (it's mission critical for work). It also serves as media center for the family -An off site server for backup (thx granma!) for the Nas, an i7 7th gen with ssd boot drive came for free (!), i just added a 2tb Nas hdd

[@JeffGeerling]

Grandma offsite backups are the best :D

[@albertocalore2414]

@@JeffGeerling they are✨

[@drumer2142]

Actually a month ago Mikrotik announced that they will be providing API on ROS V7 which is super awesome for automation.

[@anon_y_mousse]

I really need to catch up on my data hoarding. You're way ahead of me. I've only got 4tb of storage and only about 1.5tb of it is being used. Mostly for TV shows and movies, but I've got some games and a few ISO's as well.