2025 Homelab Setup

Given the choice I would treat all my homelab servers as cattle1 however there are components that do need bespoke configuration. My main home server acts as my Kubernetes Master, my on-site backup server and my Salt master. My ArchLinux home server acts as a package mirror for my desktop and laptop while also building my AUR packages to ensure they stay up to date and consistent between machines. On the other hand most of my machine configuration is fairly identical between my homelab machines. I want the same CLI tools available, similar backup configurations and want to make sure any new host can be added to Kubernetes without issue if applicable. Between these common configurations and my preference for Programmatic Configuration I knew I needed some sort of Configuration Management tool. Even my pet servers become more cattle-like since their configuration is easily reproduced on a new machine in case of a failure. ...

As I mentioned previously, I have a mixture of local and remote machines in my homelab as well as a laptop and phone that can and will connect to my various systems and applications. This means I need some sort of VPN or SD-WAN1 to ensure that the traffic remains encrypted and to provide a reliable way to connect without having to expose everything to the public internet. ...

This post kicks off an ongoing series exploring the components and applications that make up my newly rebuild homelab. A homelab is a great resource for honing DevOps and Infrastructure skills. It can be as simple as a temporary environment stood up using Docker Compose to see how some self-hosted applications work or as intricate as a whole home datacenter rack or cloud environment running everything you can think of. Just as important as the skills you gain from running a homelab is the control it gives you. If you don’t like an update to an application you can switch to a new one, you aren’t caught by the vendor because they have your data. For the last few years I’d had a single desktop server running Nomad and Consul and a handful of applications. I hadn’t used Nomad in any practical way but was curious about what it offered compared to Kubernetes. For the most part it worked but almost every time the server rebooted I would have to go and restart several of the applications to get them to properly detect one another. There were also multiple leftover configurations from experiments that hadn’t worked out making it harder to update or change anything. Finally I decided it was time to rebuild, to create a homelab that could be rebuilt programmatically when faced with a disaster. The rebuild wasn’t a single, clean sweep but evolved as I realized I wanted, or was missing, something. The changes were incorporated while ensure I would be able to redeploy and learn as I went. ...