For home usage, I highly recommend microk8s. It can be installed easily with snap. I’m not sure what’s the deal with snap for Ubuntu desktop users but I’ve only experience installing microk8s with it. And so far, it works well for the purpose.
Initially, I went with Docker Swarm because it’s so easy to setup but Docker Swarm feels like a hack. Also, it seems Swarm is already dead in the water.
The end goal is to be able to expose apps deployed locally on homelab publicly. I don’t want to expose multiple ports to the Internet for several reasons:
I have to create multiple port-forwarding rules. The address not memorable because I need to remember the ports. Eg: homeip.example.com:32400 for Plex, homeip.example.com:1194 for VPN, and so on… The alternative is to use reverse proxy.
setup reverse proxy setup port forward (80 & 443) for reverse proxy config reverse proxy to proxy the local apps Reverse proxy I would have gone with nginx but I want to tinker with Caddy.
Few weeks ago, I knew nothing about server rack. I frequent /r/homelab a lot in order to learn to build one for myself at home. These are the lessions I learnt during building my very first homelab rack.
Choose the right size You need to care 2 things about a rack size: height & depth. The width is usually pretty standard 19 inches.
Rack height is meassured in U (1.
Currently, I’m working on building my homelab. It’s still a very much work in progress but everything is coming along nicely.
I plan to host lots of stuff in my homelab and be able to access it while I’m not at home. I don’t feel comfortable exposing them all to the Internet so VPN to the rescue.
The setup is straight forward. It’s different, depends on your lab equipment but the steps are always the same.
I’m by no mean a network expert. This is just my personal experience when I setup my USG to my existing network.
In my case, I was using Orbi RBK as my router and access point. With USG in place, I will use the Orbi in access point mode. The USG will be replacing the Orbi as my router.
My current network is using 10.0.0.1/8 IP range. By default, USG uses 192.
I use this project oznu/docker-cloudflare-dns1 where the author implements everything in bash, curl and jq. There were a bunch of projects that does this DDNS with CloudFlare but I chose this project because of this uniqueness.
To use this, you just have to create an API token with Cloudflare that has these permissions:
Zone - Zone Settings - Read Zone - Zone - Read Zone - DNS - Edit Also, set zone resources to All zones.
I’ve heard a lot of praise about Pi-hole project but hadn’t gotten around actually trying it yet until recently.
Pi-hole is a network-wide ad-blocking solution via local DNS. You set it up as a local DNS server and it will block all the ads that match the rule from DNS level. This way, you don’t have to setup adblock on each and every devices you have, especially tablets and mobiles. See example of VnExpress without adblock below.
I found this guide to be extremely helpful. It was written in 2018 but the basic concepts are still true.
Do read it if you want to learn what factors to consider when buying a wireless router in 2019.
Tldr; I ended up buying Netgear Orbi RBK40. Or money is not a constraint, then Netgear Orbi RBK50. Here’re why:
802.11AC is a must. AX is not available yet. 3 and 4 streams are still expensive for home usage.