Homelab 3.0

I recently looked over my homelab and noticed it's kind of all over the place. No streamlined processes and I kinda set everything up differently on each node that I run.

So, in order to streamline things I thought long and hard how to best set up my grand new Homelab 3.0. And what new web based services I want to use and what vital role a VPN connection will play in the near future.

Here's a short list of apps I am running seperated per node:

Issues and Alibis

Now, most optimally I wouldn't have most of these applications be reachable via the internet, it also lacks security with things like Fail2Ban and is prone to Brute-Force attacks on my infrastructure. Considering I specialized in IT Security it's a shame on me for being this lazy and not following up with making my personal infrastructure and things that make my life easier - safer.

There's also no centralized logging, monitoring or alerting. I've been plenty lucky with having close to no downtime with any of my services. Except for when my ISP said so.

But where I want to go in the future is that I stop sharing most of my infrastructure with friends and family and use it mostly for myself. So I can hide most applications in the safety of my own network.

So, I have a very dear wish on how my homelab and my nodes should look like in the future, starting with choosing a dedicated name convention and moving away from domain names that I cannot cover with letsencrypt.

My nodes will be renamed in the following schema:
node<number>.<country code>.shibabox.eu

This will affect all nodes except for the mail server. For obvious reasons. (Reverse DNS Lookup)

So here's the upcoming name convention:

mail.shibabox.eu -> node01.de.shibabox.eu
gs1.shibabox.eu -> node02.de.shibabox.eu
heimdall.shibabox.eu -> infra01.de.shibabox.eu
gs2.shibabox.eu -> node01.us.shibabox.eu

The Future

And now we come to the term of what I hope to be running in the near future and what the entire infrastructure should look like most optimally. This should solve alot of problems and put my ressources to way better use. Hopefully.

In the future I plan to add a NAS to my homelab, it'll host Jellyfin / Plex + my private Storage, the Nextcloud will stick around so I can send my photos to friends / customers from conventions and the likes.

I will probably update this site as my planning goes along. I definitley want to look into automating my container updates in the near future, could be that I set up a AWX Tower for this and make some scheduled jobs that will pull the latest docker image for stuff like nginx or Wings etc.

I would also be hoping on streamlining using one database with multiple tables instead of multiple seperate containers.

Thanks for reading! If you have any input, feel free to reach out!