My home network needs work

Way Before

A year ago my home network looked like this:

No plans or vision or anything really. A few years ago it was built out a little better for security testing and studying, but not much. Mostly things were built as needed then destroyed or abandoned after. And the PoE was spotty at best.

Before

I remedied that to an extent and ended up with this:

At this state:

• TrueNAS is running on an old gaming PC.
  • intel processor
  • gigabyte motherboard
  • 16GB DDR4 RAM
  • 500GB SSD
  • 4x 10TB NAS Drives
• Proxmox running on a Supermicro
  • dual xeon processor
  • 64GB RAM
  • 1TB SSD

This was a good base, I think. I started moving towards self-hosting and pulling away from hosted services. The biggest impact was the storage from TrueNAS and moving Plex off my personal computer and to a dedicated device. I upgraded the network with the Deco since it has physical ports to plug into at each mesh device. And I added some services, the beginning of self-hosting.

But it still wasn't in a good place. The TrueNAS is underutilized, there's no automation or documentation. The problem is, I just do not have the knowledge on CI/CD tooling to make the infrastructure solid and the tedium automated. So this is the opportunity to learn.

Current State

First, I upgraded the RAM in the TrueNAS machine to 32GB. Probably unnecessary. Next I sketched out a rough plan:

• Host low resource usage apps on TrueNAS
• Rebuild LXCs as Docker containers hosted on a VM in Proxmox
• Keep infrastructure as code in a local Gitea repo
• Automate deployment, updating, and documentation.
• Document the process to get there

Gitea moved to the TrueNAS, and several more services were built out there. I started with transitioning the Miniflux LXC and the Mediaserver LXC (custom low fi python media server for family pictures/videos) to Docker-in-VM setup. This meant creating the SVC-01 VM, the first VM that would hold Docker apps on the Proxmox, and then creating CI-RUNNER-01. The runner system uses Gitea Runner to build and configure Docker images prior to deployment.

The current state looks like this:

It has taken quite a lot of work to get it to this state, and I'm nowhere near done. But the pieces are in places. I will write up the whole process in another post, it is complex. It is doable, though.

Hosted Services

It is true that I'm doing all of this to better understand and hack CI/CD services, really to just better understand what I'm looking at when I see deployable infrastructure like this at work. But the real goal is to host services myself and keep my data private for as much as I'm able. I'm still looking to expand to more apps, maybe consolidate some, and standardize it all as much as I can.

In the current state, these are the services I'm hosting:

Service	Description	Hosted Location
audiobookshelf	Audio and ebooks	TrueNAS
Calibre	ebooks	Proxmox
deluge	torrent client	TrueNAS
Garage	S3-like system for hosting tofu state	TrueNAS
Gitea	Git repository management	TrueNAS
gitea-runner	Automates building and deployment jobs	Proxmox
Homepage	a homepage dashboard	TrueNAS
Komga	comics and graphic novels	TrueNAS
mediaserver	media server for family pictures and videos	Proxmox
miniflux	RSS feed aggregator	Proxmox
NPMPlus	proxy and TLS management	TrueNAS
Nextcloud	Documents and office	Proxmox
Plex	Movies and TV	TrueNAS
rest-server	application backups	TrueNAS
Technitium	Internal DNS	Raspberry Pi
Vaultwarden	password management	TrueNAS
Vikunja	task management	TrueNAS
Website	This website	Hosted Provider
Wireguard	remote access	Proxmox

Immediate Future Plans

I'm going to document on this blog what I've done so far here, and follow through the documentation the rest of the way. I still need to get my Calibre and Nextcloud instances converted over to the new system. Then regular backups for everything.

Just as important as how it's made and structured, I need to find ways to integrated these more into my life. Like Vikunja and Nextcloud and even miniflux. These are all set up, but many are used irregularly at best.

Far Future Plans

I was going to add a self-hosted LLM system this year, but the price increases on all tech items pretty much destroyed that plan. It's still in the works but I'm holding off on any new tech purchases for a while. I can still run LLMs locally but my gaming pc/workstation only has a 4070 with 12GB VRAM. There are so many options now, I'm looking at them all and trying to make the right move.

For the networking, the Deco device does well but it could be better. I will be looking for an improved wifi mesh device that can host DNS as well, maybe removing the Raspberry Pi from my required infrastructure.

Those two changes alone will be huge. I am still looking at more additions but I want to be thoughtful and ensure I'm not adding just to add.