Dec 30, 2023 3 min read homelab

2023 Year End Homelab Services Overview

My homelab has grown a fair bit so I'd give an overview of what is running and how it's been setup.

Over the course of 2023, my homelab has grown a fair bit so I thought it'd be at good opportunity to give an overview of what is running and how it's been setup.

Everything is hosted locally on a single HP Mini Desktop. Nothing fancy; it's a homelab for running little bits for very few users, not a home datacentre, which it seems that some /r/homelab users are hosting.

Host: Proxmox

Setting up this new homelab in Germany allowed me to reset things and do it differently to how I had before. I felt that Proxmox would be the best way forward for this, both to learn a new hypervisor and to give easier separation of the services ran in VMs and containers (although everything pretty much ended up in Linux Containers).

Container 1: DNS

Debian server that simply hosts Pi-Hole, which was the most important thing to setup; the relief of no (or at least heavily reduced) adverts is all the sweeter after living a while with them again.

Container 2: Reverse Proxy

I played around a little bit with Caddy and Nginx, but settled on Nginx Proxy Manager which gives a decent web GUI, and most importantly a convenient way for me to create SSL certificates for my services, despite them not being publicly accessible.

Container 3: Containerception

This is where I run most services that are from Docker images. As a base I have Portainer for a web GUI option for it all. Other Docker containers running are:

Homepage - does what it says on the tin, and does it well with additional data in the form of a surprising amount of widgets;

My homepage consists of some system stats, weather and the time in the top-left, a search bar in the top-right, and 3 columns in the centre showing Network (Fritzbox, PiHole, and Speedtest), Services (Proxmox, NGINX Proxy Manager, and Portainer) and Information (Fosstodon, this blog, IT Tools, and Pastebin). At the bottom there are 3 columns of links: Learning, Social and Entertainment. — My Homepage

Hasty Paste - again, exactly what you think. I don't use it a whole lot, but it could come in handy at some point;
IT Tools - a great collection of programming and general computing utilities in a very well-designed web app. Need to check the strength of a password, the current UNIX timestamp, or convert JSON to CSV? It does it, along with plenty of other tasks, with the advantage of it all staying local;
Speedtest Tracker - automated tool for polling speedtest.net and recording the results. I have configured mine with Telegram notifications if the results are below certain permeters, and needed to troubleshoot a few issues after updates where it decided that I simply was no longer an admin;

My speedtest tracker dashboard, in dark mode. The latest download is 853Mbps, upload is 13Mbps, and ping shows as 13.5ms. There is a graph showing the up and download results over the last 24 hours, and a menu over on the left. — My Speedtest Tracker Dashboard

JSWiki - a fairly straightforward wiki application that allows for multiple setups and structuring, different user and group permissions and quite extensive features beyond that. I initially planned to use it for documenting my homelab so I can remember why I have done things in certain ways, but that didn't happen (classic Alex);
Watchtower - all the above needs to be updated regularly, and I'm not one to be doing that manually, which is where Watchtower comes in. Again, it has been configured to let me know what is being updated via Telegram.

Container 4: Scripts

There's another Debian container that I have for running some scripts and generally testing things.

I have been slowly building up what I have here, and if there is any obvious improvements to be made, give me a toot on Mastodon.