Wouter Gritter
Software Developer | Electronics Hobbyist | Homelab Enthusiast

Homelab!

Slightly outdated, doesn't include 10G switch

From top to bottom, my homelab contains the following hardware:

Not locally, I have some additional VMs:

Using the 2 TB NVMe SSD storage (soon to be 4 TB) on dragonnas, both hypervisors nabula and phoenix store all VM disks on the network attached storage device.

In total, including running some PoE devices like a couple Wi-Fi APs and cameras, the total power consumption hovers around 400 watt, depending on what the cluster is doing.

Self-hosted Services

Some notable services that are running on the cluster are...

Blue Iris

Blue Iris is a really great NVR software, working with my ReoLink cameras. It really likes to have a GPU for hardware en- and decoding if you have more than just a couple cameras. It's running on a legit Windows Server 2016 license I found on a sticker on the R330 server!

Home Assistant

Of course, any home that has a room dedicated to servers needs smart devices. And what better way to control these devices than to control them all locally. I have a mix of Philips Hue lighting and switches, TP-Link Tapo energy monitoring plugs and some custom ESP stuff that I can control with my home assistant instance. Most of the communication also flows through MQTT, which allows me to create intuitive flows with Node-RED to, for example, control my ESP-relay-controlled doorbell chime when my Ring camera tells me someone presses the doorbell button.

I wrote many of these "mqtt-bridge" services myself. They are mostly semi-quickly written Python scripts, but they're written in such a way that it's easy to adapt to someone's custom environment and as stable as it can be. You can find these bridges on my GitHub here!

Pterodactyl

Who doesn't love some gaming with friends? I have Pterodactyl running to be able to quickly make Minecraft servers and the odd server for a random Steam game.

PiHole

Goes without saying of course! I have PiHole running in two different VMs, on two different hypervisors for redundancy. This has saved me a lot of times already when turning off a hypervisor, because I rely on my custom DNS to connect to them.

LanCache and APT cache

I run LanCache to cache Steam games and Windows updates, and AptCacherNg to cache APT packages. I don't have a very fast WAN connection, so this helps a lot when updating. Also, seeing the multi-gigabit speeds when apt upgrade-ing and (re)downloading a game is awesome!

Lots and LOTS of Docker stacks

The aforementioned services all run in VMs for various reasons, and I try to run most of my self-hosted services in Docker when possible. I'll add more information about them on here later, but for now, here's an incomplete list of my running stacks: