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…
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!
@@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...
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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 😂
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.
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.
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.
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 TH-cam 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!
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 ^^
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.
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!
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.
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
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
My humble homelab is just a Pi connected to 8 port Gigabit switch running dnsmasq for minimal ad block setup and IP provider. At the same time it also runs NFS as a quick and dirty way for other connected devices to access the storage on the Pi. Your setup is way better than me lol. Probably better than most of us.
@@JeffGeerling yep this is the most common setup and works most of the time. Just enough to handle small work load from me. I have plans for home automation as well so my current setup might expand a bit in the future.
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.
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.
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.
I use anisble primarily for grabbing exports of all of my mikrotik devices. It is much easier than setting up scheduled email exports on each device or manually grabbing exports on each device.
That's... actually a great idea, and I should just get that set up with my other backup jobs instead of trying to automate the configuration right away.
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 :).
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!
The picture with your dad reminds me of a story my friend told me (my friend also looks a lot like his dad) - they met an acquaintance of his dad who looked at him, looked at his dad and said: Well, you can't blame that one on the mailman.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My “home lab” has 1 Pi4B that runs an Onion Service (a Dark Web Website), 1 Pi Zero W that runs a desktop 7 segment clock, 1 Pi4B that runs my Pi-hole, and 2 Pi4B:s that function as hot spares. I also use my editing/programming/gaming rig as a Plex Server (media resides on external JBOD cabinet). There’s so many Gigabit Ethernet cables I’ve got 2 desktop switches.
My lab is composed as follows: -Raspberry Pi 4 2gb with Pihole, Home assistant, Tailscale node and some backup script (64bit raspberry os, since last month!) -A Synology 2 bays Nas, with a lot of important documents and photos (it's mission critical for work). It also serves as media center for the family -An off site server for backup (thx granma!) for the Nas, an i7 7th gen with ssd boot drive came for free (!), i just added a 2tb Nas hdd
If you want to automate a RouterOS device through the command-line (and thus through Ansible), take a look at scripts. Unless I'm very much mistaken, scripting is available to all RouterOS device. If not, just use the CLI on one device to SSH into the router with a keyfile. You should be able to make it so that the key is only usable from a specific MAC address behind your NAT/PAT or link local.
My home lab has grown. ML350G8 128GB RAM, bunch of storage / VMware / Bunch of Lab servers, two Pi-Holes on two Ubuntu VMs. A NUC running Volumio to play music outside. Four NAS's. Various Unifi APs. A Meraki MX75 on the edge. A dedicated Veeam Backup machine, which sends the backups offsite to Datto's File Protection service. All this lives in my garage with a 60Ghz Mikrotik Wireless link to the house, and they also run Zero Tier so I can access then outside of my network. Oh, and of course Plex. Im a CTO for a modest IT company, and not long turned 50. Im still learning. I also tell those whom come for job interviews that IT is more than a job, its a craft, and to be good at your craft, you need to invest in yourself.
Excellent backup strategy to have 2 copies - I suggest to move one NAS to a different physical place. The backup NAS doesn't need fast connection. Imagine a fire for example where at the current solution both of them will lose all data.
Check out my backup video (link in description)-in addition to the two on-site NASes I have a full 3rd backup on Amazon Glacier (so offline-ish but very remote).
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
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!
I built a router on CentOS (using iptables, dnsmasq, quagga and tinc) on an Intel N3160 mini pc. Have the same setup at my parents house and work and use tinc as a mesh vpn to connect everything together. Have a storage server at each house and have the data rsync'd nightly to a backup drive at each house.
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
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 👍
Awesome video. Thought of doing some automation for my homelab as well. I try to have as little hardware as possible. I ran a 4 port 2.5G x86 OPNsense, a NUC with Proxmox hosting VMs (pi-hole, grafana, game server, and nextcloud). I would suggest OPNSense or PFSense for your new router setup. Very flexible...
I got started with old laptop motherboards on wooden blocks. Ran various Linux operating systems for fun but nothing useful. A few years later I set up an unRAID server from an old gaming PC. Since then I have become way more proficient with Ubuntu and expect future instances based on ubuntu server running docker etc. Although unRAID will always have a place in my life because it just works when I'm busy but allows me to tinker and play when I have some time. When I have more money I plan to set up a full rack in a dedicated room with just I/O at my desk/entertainment areas. Love these "nerdy" vids for finding interesting new approaches or ideas.
My lab is an old hp elite desk running windows, I have jellyfin running on it all the time, I'm planning on moving to truenas but not now, and a dell optiplex running as a Kodi box, and a pihole with my recursive dns address, it's really humble but I'm proud of it
My home lab is just a bucket full of things I salvaged from e-waste
The most economical approach! Just watch the power consumption ;)
Same here: 30$ mini ITX for pfSense, 60$ mini ITX for Home Assistant, 0.5$ "broken" NVR for security camera 😊
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…
@@JeffGeerling thanks
@@queenannsrevenge100 Heh, that is part of running a homelab!
Your father looks so young! I lost mine in 1997, spend all the time you can have with him, while he is with you.
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
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!
@@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...
And then it starts....
like if you know what I am talking about
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
Amazing video! Your homelab content got me interested in learning Ansible and building my own homelab
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!
Good to meet you too!
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.
There.s nothing finer than to find someone who loves what they do and make it contagious.
Ansible for home lab was an amazing talk, thanks for coming!
Glad you liked it!
0:11 Every home lab has a story.
It was DNS.
it’s always DNS
mine was DNS :')
it was DNS, now it's everything
Heh
Mine was media server. Who else?
¡Gracias!
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.
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.
You get more awesome every video I watch lol. Good thing you have a significant other that doesn't choke out that creativity 👍
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
Keep on keeping on Geerling! Looking forward, as always, to the next installment.
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.
Love seeing your dad participate in your projects. Makes me wish I had a cool dad lol
Thank you!!! I use your playbooks all the time.
You deserve a medal! Thank you for all your work!
🎖 Thanks!
You are very relatable. I think that's the key part of your success. Thanks
Thanks Jeff, makes me feel better about my collection of hardware and computers. Always learning something new.
Thanks for the selfie (and book code) at Ansiblefest. I hope you had a great time with the conference.
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.
Just give yourself a gentle slap or something, kicking yourself sounds like it might hurt!
1:30 the best Jeff Gerling content I've seen so far :)
wheeeee!
You have convinced me to try Ansible. Thanks for the video.
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
I got the motivation to make a homelab now
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!
Thanks to you and your book i am now working full time with ansible :)
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 😂
there are several things that makes happy. Some of them are my homelab, servers at work, games, and your videos.
Your book is awesome.
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.
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.
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.
You and your dad are hilarious together. Love the videos!
Very insightful Jeff!
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 TH-cam 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!
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 ^^
The idea of automating some of the mundane parts of labbing sound fun. I might have to check it all out!
Thanks, Jeff. 👍
• desktop with bevy of fans
• vintage rpi's and laptops
• consumer grade, ancient and embarrassing
• evaluating diy solutions for iSCSI jbod
• SSDs, HDDs, USBs and uSD cards
• sundry cloud
Hehe I mean compared to many homelabbers, my ASUS router is also consumer grade and embarassing!
@@JeffGeerling Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
An official home assistant ansible integration would be pretty cool
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.
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!
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.
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
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 :)
5:00 that's the father son relationship we all want
Hope you had a good time in Chicago! I can't imagine going there on purpose! -STL 😅
Heh, I made sure to get a hot dog with ketchup!
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.
Just bought your book because of this video wish me luck on the ansible journey
Good luck!
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.
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.
Love your videos! Wish you all the success. Please keep up the videos, they are fantastic!
Thanks
My humble homelab is just a Pi connected to 8 port Gigabit switch running dnsmasq for minimal ad block setup and IP provider. At the same time it also runs NFS as a quick and dirty way for other connected devices to access the storage on the Pi. Your setup is way better than me lol. Probably better than most of us.
But your setup is probably about the most common-it's a great little setup that's already better than what 99% of the world has :)
@@JeffGeerling yep this is the most common setup and works most of the time. Just enough to handle small work load from me. I have plans for home automation as well so my current setup might expand a bit in the future.
You are Jeff Geerling and you are my hero!
I've had that book for years... Never knew it was you!
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.
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.
Good stuff Jeff. Inspiring and useful.
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.
I use anisble primarily for grabbing exports of all of my mikrotik devices. It is much easier than setting up scheduled email exports on each device or manually grabbing exports on each device.
That's... actually a great idea, and I should just get that set up with my other backup jobs instead of trying to automate the configuration right away.
Great video. Love the projects and review. I too live in STL area.
So inspiring, a video of great energy!
man you inspire me a lot to learn new things
Hi Jeff, a wonderful amazing video.
Thanks for the tour through the Geerling "data center."
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 :).
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!
The picture with your dad reminds me of a story my friend told me (my friend also looks a lot like his dad) - they met an acquaintance of his dad who looked at him, looked at his dad and said: Well, you can't blame that one on the mailman.
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.
Valeu!
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.
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.
I'm currently testing both Shinobi and Frigate-Shinobi so far was the easiest to get up and running on my Pi.
@@JeffGeerling have a look at your github issue, i commented some info i collected.
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.
Enjoyed your presentation at AnsibleFest! Hope you had a great time at the test of the conference and got to get into a lab! 🤣
i hope you can make a separate series called ansible night once a week would be perfect
My “home lab” has 1 Pi4B that runs an Onion Service (a Dark Web Website), 1 Pi Zero W that runs a desktop 7 segment clock, 1 Pi4B that runs my Pi-hole, and 2 Pi4B:s that function as hot spares.
I also use my editing/programming/gaming rig as a Plex Server (media resides on external JBOD cabinet).
There’s so many Gigabit Ethernet cables I’ve got 2 desktop switches.
"And your significant other begins to wonder why the electric bill shot up so quick?"
Had me rolling. Yup she noticed.
@07:26 - Mullet Rack: Business in the front... PARTY in the back!
Love stuff like this thanks man
You should come to All Things Open one year, Jeff, and give a talk or just meet up with homelabbers here!
The rat's nest was clearly automated.
My lab is composed as follows:
-Raspberry Pi 4 2gb with Pihole, Home assistant, Tailscale node and some backup script (64bit raspberry os, since last month!)
-A Synology 2 bays Nas, with a lot of important documents and photos (it's mission critical for work). It also serves as media center for the family
-An off site server for backup (thx granma!) for the Nas, an i7 7th gen with ssd boot drive came for free (!), i just added a 2tb Nas hdd
Grandma offsite backups are the best :D
@@JeffGeerling they are✨
If you want to automate a RouterOS device through the command-line (and thus through Ansible), take a look at scripts. Unless I'm very much mistaken, scripting is available to all RouterOS device. If not, just use the CLI on one device to SSH into the router with a keyfile. You should be able to make it so that the key is only usable from a specific MAC address behind your NAT/PAT or link local.
Now I know why we really have a Pi shortage… Red shirt Jeff bought them all. 😂
You’re from Missouri!!! Greetings from Springfield.
My home lab has grown. ML350G8 128GB RAM, bunch of storage / VMware / Bunch of Lab servers, two Pi-Holes on two Ubuntu VMs. A NUC running Volumio to play music outside. Four NAS's. Various Unifi APs. A Meraki MX75 on the edge. A dedicated Veeam Backup machine, which sends the backups offsite to Datto's File Protection service.
All this lives in my garage with a 60Ghz Mikrotik Wireless link to the house, and they also run Zero Tier so I can access then outside of my network.
Oh, and of course Plex.
Im a CTO for a modest IT company, and not long turned 50. Im still learning. I also tell those whom come for job interviews that IT is more than a job, its a craft, and to be good at your craft, you need to invest in yourself.
Excellent backup strategy to have 2 copies - I suggest to move one NAS to a different physical place. The backup NAS doesn't need fast connection. Imagine a fire for example where at the current solution both of them will lose all data.
Check out my backup video (link in description)-in addition to the two on-site NASes I have a full 3rd backup on Amazon Glacier (so offline-ish but very remote).
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
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!
now i dont feel so bad about my wire management. thanks Jeff. lol
Doctor Who poster in the background grants the user +10 respect points
You should mention the engineering channel more often. I had no clue it was a thing
I built a router on CentOS (using iptables, dnsmasq, quagga and tinc) on an Intel N3160 mini pc. Have the same setup at my parents house and work and use tinc as a mesh vpn to connect everything together. Have a storage server at each house and have the data rsync'd nightly to a backup drive at each house.
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
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 👍
This is my favourite youtuber ❤
Awesome video. Thought of doing some automation for my homelab as well.
I try to have as little hardware as possible. I ran a 4 port 2.5G x86 OPNsense, a NUC with Proxmox hosting VMs (pi-hole, grafana, game server, and nextcloud).
I would suggest OPNSense or PFSense for your new router setup. Very flexible...
I got started with old laptop motherboards on wooden blocks. Ran various Linux operating systems for fun but nothing useful. A few years later I set up an unRAID server from an old gaming PC. Since then I have become way more proficient with Ubuntu and expect future instances based on ubuntu server running docker etc. Although unRAID will always have a place in my life because it just works when I'm busy but allows me to tinker and play when I have some time. When I have more money I plan to set up a full rack in a dedicated room with just I/O at my desk/entertainment areas. Love these "nerdy" vids for finding interesting new approaches or ideas.
I also love hearing about other setups, there's almost always a little hack that I end up incorporating into my own setup!
My lab is an old hp elite desk running windows, I have jellyfin running on it all the time, I'm planning on moving to truenas but not now, and a dell optiplex running as a Kodi box, and a pihole with my recursive dns address, it's really humble but I'm proud of it
Actually a month ago Mikrotik announced that they will be providing API on ROS V7 which is super awesome for automation.