Building a homelab

Over the past half a year (starting around this post: Music updates) I've been slowly building out a homelab.

Despite being adjacent to communities where this is common (Recurse, etc.), this wasn't something I thought I would do a few years ago: too much effort for the expected return. A couple of things changed since then:

• My present work at Voltus requires me to at least think of infrastructure issues a fair bit more: the engineering team is still small enough that I need to get into the weeds of how things are configured, deployed and monitored-- not just how they work at the data and application layer.
• The software stack around it has gotten better: we're long past the days where this meant dangerously exposing a raw Linux system on a router. Also there are many more actually useful things you can run.
• LLMs make this type of thing vastly easier to build independently with only generalist-level knowledge.

The exact architecture is still a work in progress, but the basic components are in place:

• Using Tailscale for the network boundary. This lets me run a bunch of network services using my local machines without exposing them directly to the internet. I can run services with minimal (or even no) built-in authentication since access is controlled by the tailnet.
• Using an old w520 for the main "persistent" system server running the network services. 8 GB, Intel Sandy Bridge. It's underpowered by today's standards but more than enough to run the types of things I might want to do (music servers, read-it-later, lightweight notebooks, ai agent harnesses).
• Storing persistent configuration as a git repository. Mostly a bunch of docker service definitions and systemd units, along with README.md files describing how to set it up and run it when I inevitably forget. I'm thinking about moving some of this to nix someday, but haven't found a compelling reason to do so other than "nix is cool, I want to learn more about it" (maybe that's enough).

Here is the server in all its glory:

The setup so far is:

• jellyfin for music listening
• readeck for saving useful posts to disk (after Mozilla discontinued Pocket, I determined that I should never trust a third party service to do this again)
• marimohub for exploring analytical ideas / questions in notebook form (it's a little under-documented right now, but it supports tailscale authentication headers out of the box, I might write more about this later)
• pi-web for interactive coding (honestly mostly used for working on this system recursively, but maybe more one day)

I'm pretty happy with the setup as a learning experience. I've been using various LLMs to build it, but try to understand their end products. Feels like the appropriate use of technology: the configuration is mostly boilerplate, the interesting questions for me are higher level: what does each additional piece of functionality allow me to do, what are the risks, etc. I could of course "do things the hard way" and reproduce tailscale configuration and systemd files from scratch but it just doesn't seem quite worth it. At present, I don't have the ambition of becoming an infrastructure engineer.

I don't really have illusions that this system is incredibly useful or life changing in itself-- it just replaces a few cloud services I would otherwise pay for (or be sad when they go away, as happened with Pocket). Most of the value is in the experience of building it.