Homelab (1): Overview

I am a tech scavenger, and quite proud of my homelab setup. Now, I am going to tell you all about it.

This series is not aimed to provide you with every details of the setup, but will document the problems I encountered and the solution to them. If you are a newbie who wants to have your first homelab, I strongly recommend you read through this. Reasons? It once helped me. By the way, don’t hesitate to search for the terminology you encountered during reading, those may open up a whole new perspective. However, keep in mind that, I am also a beginner in exploring the capability of homelab, so don’t hesitate to question the method and conclusion I give in my blog.

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Contents

Overview

Hardware

Networking

Home server

Remote server

Clients

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My tech setup provides me a lot convenience in my daily life, and provided to be fairly reliable—- the server keeps functioning properly without restarting for over two month till now. Currently, I lives in dorm at school, giving me an interesting scenario to deal with.

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The topology of my network

The topology is important, because it not only gives you a brief look at how many physical and virtual devices you have, it can also give you the relationship between them, greatly reduce the further work of adding or removing things from your network. As a result, when designing a Homelab, it is better to have a general idea of what the topology of it be like.

This is the structure of my service and users of my home. Some services are nested inside others for specific purpose that I will mention in later chapters.

This structure is simple because of the limited performance of the VPS I rent.

This is the whole network structure of my devices. This should give you a general idea of what my setup is like. The details here are not important in this chapter, and I will discuss them in later chapter.

Basically, my network has three parts and are all connected to the internet. To achieve such scale of services from scratch (sort of), I searched and learned a lot. Do not be scared by this. It is built from scratch, but has solid feedback and progressive sense of achievement that can inspire you to infinite and beyond.

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My lovely, lovely servers

The server at Seattle is a VPS hosted by Vultr, costing me $5 per month (Extreme expensive for a tech scavenger), which is worthy of two large bottles of branded bubble tea!

Utility	Function
WordPress	The blog post you are reading here
VPN	To escape geo-block

The server at home is technically remote to me because I am at school. However, I set up the OpenVPN client on my PC at school with auto-starting, and only routing the desired network segment. As a result, the whole experience is seamless. Besides, sometimes the auto-start won’t work, the OpenVPN GUI disappears, DNS cannot resolve my home URL and etc., these minimal problems. Since restarting client program always works, I did not pay great attention to them.

Utility	Function
Proxmox VE	The virtualize environment for all my other utilities
PfSense	Firewall at home, also functioning as a VPN server
TrueNAS	An file server for all my files
OpenVPN	For remote accessing the resources at home
Portainer	Docker interface to help hosting containers
Syncthing	Sync file across devices, mainly for my documents
Pi-hole	An ad-blocking DNS for home
Minecraft	24/7 server for my friends, inside a jail of TrueNAS
Qbit	Torrent downloader, fully utilizing bandwidth

For me, privacy is not the main target. It is only a side mission when I try to enrich the function on my servers. So, no special attention was paid to it. However, safety is one of many concern. With that said, safety is from a long-term habit, rather than a instant click of two.

Some side note for no purpose (maybe for fun, I guess), the home server sits in living room due to some design flaw of my parents’ house. Someone dumped all the garbage of construction into a 4×1.8x2m spare space and sealed it with concert, which in fact is very suitable for a server room and some other house-hold storage. Thanks.

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My cuties, cuties PCs and accessories

Despite my very love for my lovely, lovely server, I don’t want to sit next to it every single time I operate it. The server is the backbone of my homelab, while the PCs are the frontend, which I essentially interact with. As a result, the setup should be as comfortable as possible without blowing my budget.

This part is less important towards the main topic of homelab. But, by including this part, I can share you some story about my scavenger hunt in later chapter.

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My “routers” (AP and switch two-in-one, to be precise)

As shown in the picture, my ethernet cable is not plugged into the WAN port. Instead, I connect it to LAN port. This is because my goal is to build a single big network segment inside my home without any routing, allowing the interconnectivity between devices on different floor. Such compensated solution is the result of my ignorance of designing the network when moving in this house. Instead of simply using switches and APs, I bought each floor a router, resulting in bad Wi-Fi connectivity and unnecessary routing. By only using the LAN port, I convert the router into a switch and AP two-in-one, working around the unnecessary routing issues.

The routers I am using are all from TP-Link, and is at most 45 bucks. Nothing fancy. But they serve me well. Choosing routers from this brand is not for any performance or special function, if it really has some, but just for their compatibility with each other because of shared engineer team and their decent price. I once bought a router from H3C within the same price range, but quickly found out that it had some glitches when changing its management IP address to match my other three TP-Link routers. I returned it, got a refund and bought another TP-Link router.

Tips: Go figuring out the difference between routers, switches, and APs!

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Nest stop: Hardware

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To do homelab, do not hesitate to search and learn, which themselves are fun.

Loe