About my homelab

Like a lot of people in my field, I have a homelab. This runs a load of services that I use personally including:

  • Traefik as a reverse proxy for all services
  • OpenCloud for file synchronisation
  • Immich for self-hosted photo storage
  • Forgejo for self-hosted Git repositories
  • Unifi for controlling my home switches and access points
  • OPNsense as my firewall

I don’t use this so much currently for proving out work stuff, but it comes in very useful for testing and experimenting. Pretty much everything is Docker-based for portability (I’ve rebuilt the host multiple times) with persistent storage on a ZFS array.

My favourite thing about working in the technology sector is that there’s always cool new stuff to get to grips with, and being able to try things out at home often feeds into my tool choices at work. Where there’s something with more features, or more reliability, that gives me something that can have a genuine impact.

Future things to try

  • Talos; bare-metal Kubernetes distribution-slash-operating-system
    • Combined with ArgoCD for declarative configuration
  • NixOS; operating system configured declaratively
    • I currently use Debian and intended to manage it purely with Ansible to make sure the configuration was reproducible if it needed to be, however this hasn’t panned out how I intended