This thread has called to me...
I've spent the weekend rejigging and consolidating a bunch of cobbled-together infrastructure, so I can lay a decent foundation for a more comprehensive home hosting setup. A lot of it has involved stuff that isn't actually hosted at home (DNS, a VPN, vaultwarden, and firefox sync server, to name four), but it's setting the groundwork. I've organised everything under a single domain and have my LAN DNS configured to hand out subdomains on home.<domain>. The external DNS has home.<domain>. blackholed, for obvious reasons. This gives me options for unifying access to private services that I might host elsewhere.
At home, I currently have an old MZBSWIP-SI, basically a NUC before NUCs were really a thing, serving as the master node for a kubernetes cluster (which currently consists of... nothing else), using k3s. I had planned to cluster a bunch of raspberry pis with it as well, to host music/media players and little utilities in various places, and even got a fair way along to getting mpd, librespot, and snapcast - a synchronised, multi-room audio streaming system - to work together in containers, using the host's ALSA mixer. Unfortunately, snapcast suffered a weird stuttering issue that put me off pursuing it; it runs as a daemon on the nuc-thingy, rather than a container, and I replaced the music nodes with hifiberryOS, which was good enough at the time. Future plans here are to revive the pi cluster, so I can install a voice control system (
Willow is the current candidate) and integrate it with:
Home Assistant. The reason I got into this autism to begin with. I've had it controlling lights and heating in the past, but it's currently only telling me how humid everything is (this place is 110 years old and needs a lot of repair, so I've been monitoring it for the last few months see if the damp is a feature or just a side-effect of being empty for so long before we moved in). Aside from lights and heat, I also plan on using it to monitor and possibly control the whole-house UPS that I'm
very slowly putting together, which will charge on cheap rates at night and automatically switch over to power the house during the day. If I'm feeling clever enough, I may also use the HA snapcast integration to set up a door bell and intercom, with cameras and fancy dandy stuff. I have a little pile of cheap android tablets that I'll be mounting in various rooms to serve as control panels.
There's also a two drive synlogy NAS lurking in the background, hosting media and system backups. I plan to replace it at some point, as it's getting a bit tight and doesn't have any redundancy; I'll probably stick with synology because the software is good enough for my purposes, though I might be tempted to give trueNAS a go, if I have the time. I also plan to install a NAS at my brother's place, so we can keep backups for each other.
A small server rack is starting to look mighty tempting... just a 4U. Or maybe a 6.
Next weekend, I'm going to cut down a tree.
