115 lines
6.6 KiB
Markdown
115 lines
6.6 KiB
Markdown
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---
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date: 2023-12-01
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title: My Current Software Stack
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tags:
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- homelab
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- software
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- unraid
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---
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As part of planning [some hardware upgrades](https://blog.mcknight.tech/2023/11/29/Homelab-Upgrades/),
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I think it is important to evaluate the software side of things to make sure everything is accounted for
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in the new design. This is also a good opportunity to evaluate and prune what I have running before
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deciding where to move things around.
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## Virtual Machines
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I run a few VMs on my Unraid server; many are seldom used but a couple of them I use on a regular basis.
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None of these need anything like five-nines availability, but they do need somewhere to run when needed.
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- Cura: I have an Ubuntu VM that is dedicated to running Cura for 3D printing. I use several diferent
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computers throughout the day, so being able to slice and print things wherever I am (including from
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my phone) is really handy.
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- Windows 10: This Windows VM has a Bluray drive attached for working with my media collection or the
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odd piece of software that I have on optical media.
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- pfSense: This VM is configured with an Intel NIC to be manually spun up before taking my main pfSense
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box down for maintenance. This VM isn't used often but it is essential to keeping the network up.
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## Container Services
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This is where the bulk of my services exist. Unraid uses Docker with some specialized templating to
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provide a nice Web UI for deployment, but I would be happy writing my own [Helm charts](https://helm.sh/) or
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[Docker Compose](https://docs.docker.com/compose/) files to deploy things. There are a lot of containers here
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so I'll try and organize them into some logical groups.
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### Core Networking
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These services are essential to keeping my network up and supporting other services. Outages here
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can bring down other services or parts of my network.
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- DDClient: lets my domain registrar know when my public IP address changes
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- LetsEncrypt: reverse-proxy for routing traffic to the appropriate container
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- Unifi: controller and web UI for Ubiquiti networking
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- Mosquitto: MQTT server used to connect ZWave devices to HomeAssistant
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### Database and Backend
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These provide support for other services. An outage here will affect some specific
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other services.
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- MariaDB: used by some other containers; I wouldn't mind eliminating or replacing this with Mongodb if I can.
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I know practically no SQL and a little Mongodb
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- zwavejs2mqtt: connects to zwave devices to HomeAssistant
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- Frigate: security camera monitoring, object detection, and recording
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### User-Facing Services
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These are the things you probably think of as what a home server is used for. Everything
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here has a Web UI or is accessible via client software (or both).
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- hexo-blog: this.
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- Vaultwarden: password manager for Bitwarden clients
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- Plex: media server; I may move to Emby or Jellyfin as media tagging has been less reliable for me lately
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and the recent [watch history debacle](https://www.techhive.com/article/2157803/plex-discover-together-privacy-concerns.html)
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is another nudge to find something better.
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- Nextcloud: cloud storage, contacts, calendar, client device backups
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- Matrix: [matrix chat](https://matrix.org/) home server
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- HomeAssistant: smart home controls/automation and camera monitoring
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- Heimdall: web dashboard; I just played with this and don't find myself using it often so I'll probably drop it
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- Grafana: monitoring dashboard
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- GitLab: self-hosted git; I don't use this much but do like having a GitHub alternative available for private
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projects (yes, I know you can have private repos on GitHub)
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### Monitoring
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These services monitor the other services. If something goes wrong here I'm likely the only one to notice.
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- Influxdb: time-series database used to collect data for Grafana dashboards
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- Tautulli: pulls Plex analytics, used to populate Grafana
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- Varken: More Plex analytics middle-ware to push analytics to Influxdb
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- UniFi-Poller: pulls Unifi analytics into Influxdb for Grafana
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- Telegraf: pulls Unraid server analytics into Influxdb for Grafana
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### Mostly Unused
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A few containers I have mostly spun-down. Some of these are for testing/evaluation and others I just haven't bothered removing.
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- ActualServer and Firefly-III: personal budgeting apps since [Mint](https://support.creditkarma.com/s/article/Intuit-Mint-and-Credit-Karma)
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is going away; neither really does what Mind does for me but I need an alternative since Mint is shutting down at the end of the year and
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CreditKarma doesn't appear to be getting budgets which is what Mint did for me.
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- Handbrake: video encoder; I will probably run this in a VM if I move containers to k8s since I only run this as an Unraid container to
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easily leverage all of my server's cores
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- Genea: family tree builder, because that's the kind of data I won't put into a random webapp on the internet
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- element-web: a Matrix client; I installed this with Matrix but never use it
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- RabbitMQ: MQ server that I setup once in the early days of the [Diana backend](https://github.com/NeonGeckoCom/neon-diana-utils) I made
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for work.
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- Wireshark: packet sniffing and more network stuff; realistically I would run this on a workstation if I need it
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## Other
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Aside from VMs and Containers, there is some basic functionality that needs to be addressed, namely data shares and VPN access.
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### Network Shares
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Unraid exposes SMB shares with some basic user access control. Shares on Unraid can utilize separate Cache and Array storage pools;
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both pools offer redundancy but the smaller Cache pool is faster than the larger Array pool. I'll go into storage in more detail when
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I look at solutions for storage.
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### WireGuard
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Unraid includes a WireGuard server which I use to remote into my network when travelling if I need to access the filesystem or a shell
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directly. This is particularly helpful if I need to restart a container or find something on a network share that isn't served via Plex
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or Nextloud.
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## Putting It All Together
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This was all a long way of getting to what I really need in my software stack:
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- Virtualization with device passthrough, i.e. a [KVM](https://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page) Hypervisor
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- Container support, likely [k3s](https://k3s.io/)
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- VPN access. I might delegate this to pfSense since that would allow for remote access in the event the cluster
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is offline so long as the router is on
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- Network shares
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I already mentioned [in my previous post](https://blog.mcknight.tech/2023/11/29/Homelab-Upgrades/) that upgrading my pfSense router
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and picking a storage solution. I found some old network appliances repurposed to run pfSense [on ebay](https://www.ebay.com/itm/186181814221)
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and plan on picking one up for a relatively inexpensive, low-power, and (hopefully) reliable solution.
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