¶ What software do I run in my homelab
I use my home lab for a lot of things a few is to home my sysadmin skills and others are purely to check out new tech or things that seem to be interesting.
¶ Base software
¶ Opnsense firewall
I have fiber internet and my ISP allows me to run my own router directly attached to the wall, so I bought a small fanless PC with two 10Gbit SFP ports, one 1Gbit SFP port and four 2.5Gbit Ethernet ports and for the firewall I run on it is Opnsense. I've thought about others like VyOS but it is more a router and requires a lot more planning to run so I've stayed with Opnsense.
¶ Load balancer
A load balancer? What do you need that for?
Well I'm a sysadm, so I try to plan for as little downtime as possible, so when ever I setup something then I try to
- make sure I have 2 of the same service
- make sure the 2 services can sync one way or other
- make sure I can do a failover from one to the other (active-passive) or run both at the same time (active-active) so I can do updates without downtime
So for a load balancer I run HAProxy - a software based load balancer that can run on as little as 1 CPU and 256-512Mb of RAM and is really easy to use and very very powerfull. With ~4 CPUs and 8GB RAM you can run a full production site with millions of connections a day, so definetly worth your time if you are looking for a load balancer. They have a enterprise version at the .com domain if you want to take it further.
I run 2 of them on 2 small Alpine Linux installtions with rsync installed for copying over the config when ever I do an update and then run a remote SSH reload of the service on the second server.
I'm looking into some more automation of it but for the past few years that has sufficed for me.
¶ A Wiki
This wiki is also something I run at home.
It is WikiJS. I use Confluence at work which is kinda the best wiki in the world, but I'm not a fan of the tech (Java) and the fact that I have to pay for it.. though while writing this I just found out they have a new small free plan that I've just tested out - no public pages. So I'm sticking with WikiJS for now. I hope a FOSS project will start developing something that works like confluence aka keyboard shortcuts and navigation etc. It would be enjoyable - I'd even pay for it.
¶ Other software
Since I'm running a Proxmox hypervisor on 3 servers with 3x64GB RAM and 5TB storage in a Ceph cluster in it then I can more or less run anything I want.
For now I'll just give you a few
- PowerDNS - for DNS - 3 domains (this isn't my only one, though one of the domains is example.com ... fo rtesting purposes
) - PostgreSQL - as backend for all my programs that I use. If I test an application that uses MySQL then I install a local MariaDB on the VM for that as I'm not a big fan of that database execpt the master-master replication they have.
- Gitea - for my own personal projects
- Gitlab CE - for my family company code
- Salt Stack - for mananaging my VMs - It is better than Ansible/Puppet and Chef etc.