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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Merch: redshirtjeff.com
2nd Channel: / geerlingengineering
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!

[@WolfgangsChannel]

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

[@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.

[@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

[@roguethinker6284]

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

[@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!

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="11">0:11</a> 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!

[@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

[@Kube4x]

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

[@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.

[@Mr402TA]

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

[@ismascarade]

I got the motivation to make a homelab now

[@muddyexport5639]

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

[@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.

[@thij_zert]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="90">1:30</a> the best Jeff Gerling content I've seen so far :)

[@JeffGeerling]

wheeeee!

[@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.

[@Richardj410]

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

[@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.

[@phoenixbird09]

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

[@JeffGeerling]

🎖 Thanks!

[@ehh54]

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

[@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 😂

[@toddblanchard7765]

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

[@Radek125]

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

[@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 ^^

[@TK-vh5pv]

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

[@mikemegalodon2114]

So inspiring, a video of great energy!

[@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!

[@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!

[@ve2dmn]

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

[@Mr_Kirk_]

Good stuff Jeff. Inspiring and useful.

[@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!

[@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

[@Catge]

Very insightful Jeff!

[@NoFaceCobain]

Love stuff like this thanks man

[@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

[@johnsummers7389]

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

[@ArifKamaruzaman]

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

[@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!

[@mm345-0]

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

[@temyraverdana6421]

Hi Jeff, a wonderful amazing video.

[@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.

[@AustinEschweiler]

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

[@tergkyit]

Amazing video.

[@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.

[@julianoalberto]

Your book is awesome.

[@MrBharathkumarraju]

man you inspire me a lot to learn new things

[@hicalls]

Thanks for sharing

[@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!

[@chuxxsss]

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

[@pbartkus]

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

[@andre-le-bone-aparte]

@<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="446">07:26</a> - Mullet Rack: Business in the front... PARTY in the back!

[@dushkodavchev]

You are Jeff Geerling and you are my hero!

[@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.

[@peterwalker5413]

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

[@fedemtz6]

An official home assistant ansible integration would be pretty cool

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

The rat's nest was clearly automated.

[@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! 🤣

[@davevq]

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

[@JoshWillcock]

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

[@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.

[@edvardfranke]

Boah kool Thx for sharing

[@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 :).

[@tgvinfinite2607]

yay a new upload

[@klzgh]

¡Gracias!

[@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 :)

[@theccieguy]

Great 👍 Job

[@elabeddhahbi3301]

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

[@shoosh6398]

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

[@JeffGeerling]

Good luck!

[@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

[@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.

[@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.

[@KevinVisscher]

Nice!

[@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...

[@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.

[@ToddWalton]

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

[@PetterBruland]

Love the shirt! :)

[@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.

[@ostapkurtash6359]

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

[@robduncan2816]

now i dont feel so bad about my wire management. thanks Jeff. lol

[@melonhead122908]

You’re from Missouri!!! Greetings from Springfield.

[@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.

[@williamb3503]

very nice

[@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.

[@-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 👍

[@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

[@mikkelisaksenrobinson]

This is my favourite youtuber ❤

[@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.

[@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.

[@peterroberts3827]

Hahaha ‘It was DNS’ So many times 😂

[@MarioLuigi0404]

My home lab is a humble thing; it’s mostly just my gaming PC being used for multiple purposes. But it gets the job done, at least for now, so I’m content enough until I can expand.

[@Werdna12345]

You should mention the engineering channel more often. I had no clue it was a thing

[@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!

[@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.

[@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

[@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.

[@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!

[@thecloudterminal]

🙌🙌 Thank you for creating this great video

[@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.

[@LadyIvy]

I want to get into ansible tbh. recently I got into more homelab stuff it’s a ton of fun.