The Netyeti's Journal

The Stack

2 min read

1) Initial documentation tools

Obsidian is free and super extendable - with collaboration. Notes, mind-storming, and journaling with GitHub-Quartz-Obsidian. Documentation is very important! Start with something like Obsidian and generate a documented plan before beginning to build your home-lab.Like this document, really.

2) Basic Infrastructure tools:

The basics of a home-lab. Start with 1 and finish with 11. Doing them in order kinda helps.

  1. Hardware - Router, server hardware, storage hardware, WiFi, etc
  2. Domain - registrar, etc
  3. Proxmox - This will be the home of “all the things” virtual
  4. Apt Cacher NG - Speed up deployments and reduce bandwidth to the internet
  5. Technitium - Internal DNS
  6. Vaultwarden - Secrets management
  7. Homepage - A place to link to “all the things” (aka - “The One Ring”)
  8. Wireguard - Remote, secure, VPN access. Alternatively use Tailscale if no static IP address is available.
  9. Registry with Registry-UI - a local, secure, caching (pull thruogh) Docker registry to speed deployments and reduce bandwith to the internet. Also adds some developmental options and a layer of security
  10. PXEBoot - for staging and thick clients
  11. Portainer and Docker

3) Basic Monitoring Tools

  • NtopNG - IDS, monitoring, alerting, and debugging
  • Grafana with all the extras and supporting cast

4) Backups and File Access

  • Proxmox Backup Server
  • SyncThing - File backup and sharing/collaberating
  • RSync - System backup solution
  • FileBrowser Quantum - Easy file access tool for various other services/apps (can be added to any LXC or VM that does not have a file access GUI but needs one)

Standalone/external configs/services/apps

  • Email - Necessary - alerts, updates, etc. Mail server - MailU ?
  • Discord - Optional Social
  • Slack - Optional social
  • ssh - Necessary - Remote access and administration

Other Useful services

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