Homelab

Over the years I’ve been experimenting with the idea of running services at home. The core services I run are:

• Plex - A media server
• Miniflux - A RSS reader
• Mealie - A recipe manager
• Home Assistant - A home automation platform

Server Build

I built a custom server that had enough compute to run all the services and enough hard drive capacity for my storage needs. My main requirements are:

• Low power consumption as the server runs 24/7
• Low noise as the server is in my living room, so that rules out server fans
• Support hardware transcoding as my server will run Plex, having hardware encoding is a lot more efficient than software encoding
• High storage capacity so I can store all my media and grow the storage pool over time

Below is the hardware list, with some notes around why I picked each part:

• Intel Core i5 11500
  • 6 cores, 12 threads
  • Hardware transcoding for Plex
• MSG MAG B560 Torpedo motherboard
  • Dual ethernet (1G, 2.5G)
  • Heaps of SATA and M.2 ports
• 64GB (4x16GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX 3600MHz DDR4 RAM
  • Enough RAM for running all the services I could possibly want
• 2 x Samsung 980 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD
  • One for the OS, one for application data
• SilverStone 550W Strider 80+ Platinum power supply
  • Platinum efficiency for reduced power consumption

Container Orchestration

I’ve experimented with a few different container orchestration platforms to find the best fit for my needs.

• I started with a simple Docker Compose script, but found it was tedious to maintain and had some shortcomings.
• I then moved to Kubernetes, which I was also learning for work at the time, which addressed a lot of the issues that I had with the previous setup, but found writing the Kubernetes manifests to be a bit verbose.
• I then moved to Nomad, which advertised itself as a simpler alternative to Kubernetes.

I paired Nomad with Docker and Consul to provide the base infrastructure used to run the applications.

Custom-built Landing Page

I built a landing page to display links to all the services.

The dashboard was built with the following technologies:

• Next.js
• Material UI
• Docker

The list of services is populated via Consul service discovery.

New services can easily be added to the dashboard by adding a service block to the Nomad jobspec, with the “ui” tag. Optionally a icon metadata field can be added with a icon name from Font Awesome to be displayed on the UI.

service {
  name = "miniflux"
  tags = ["app", "ui"]
  meta {
    icon = "fa-newspaper"
  }
  port = "ui"
}

const test = "test";

Monitoring

Monitoring is done with Prometheus, Grafana and a handful of exporters.