There are a ton of resources about HW aspects of home labs for beginners but not so much for what to run on them and why. There are lists like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted but they are confusing for absolute beginners like me. Are there any good SW project guides you know?
I’m running a scraper for Dune movie tickets on mine. Before that I didn’t really have anything to do on it besides learning about Proxmox, VMs, networking, and cloud-init. Maybe try to run something you’d usually spin up a VPS for.
Admittedly, it makes way more sense once you have more than one person in your household. I ended up running most things in docker on a Raspberry Pi 4.
Started with
- PiHole to cut down on ads and try to keep the kids from clicking malware links
- added network attached storage to make it easier to share files with the family
- added Jellyfin to share music with people in the house (kids gotta grow up listening to good music)
- added syncthing to be able to ditch dropbox and still keep multiple computer file folders synced
- ran a Minecraft server, then a Terraria server, then shut those down since we moved on to other games
- turned on an ntp server since ddwrt router wasn't getting the time from the internet reliably
- added librespeed and ittools for quick wifi-speed-testing and to convert docker-run commands to docker-compose commands
- needed a webpage with links to start keeping track of all of this, so lighttpd it is...
- smokeping and blip were fired up when the internet got flaky and I needed more data to explain to the ISP what I was seeing
- Got a 3D printer, and Octoprint made it easy to start and monitor prints without having to pull a microSD card out of the socket every time.
- Figured, while we're here, that I might as well explore the smart-home thing with HomeAssistant -- now we have a handful of lightbulbs and smart power switches that mean you don't have to get up to change the lights quite as often (not everything is on a smart control, just a few out-of-the-way things. Oh, yeah, handy during Christmas-time to turn the tree lights on and off without having to fumble behind the tree for the little switch.)
- That, of course, lead to an MQTT broker (mosquitto), which is kind of a budget pub-sub broker
- And now that I have docker logs with things I need to debug, Dozzle serves those logs in a handy webpage. Not secure, but it's not like this is enterprise server.
- Then I wanted to play around with timeseries data (just to learn), so (running out of RAM at this point, so I couldn't just fire up Grafana) kept digging until I found VictoriaMetrics, which was quite happy to catch metrics (fired at it from Benthos) and visualize some 3 years of hourly Beijing weather data. (Seriously, I'm still amazed how lightweight, simple, and easy to use VictoriaMetrics is)
- currently thinking of kicking the tires on the NATS message broker and see if I can get the multi-node clustering to work. No real purpose other than see what it's like and dream about silly developer projects.
- also thinking of exploring SeaweedFS -- might be nice to have horizontally scalable storage, as each of my nodes are scattered around the house depending on where I can put an Ethernet drop.
- after a few years going along this journey, it has the perk of having helped me get my current job, which is pretty cool.
So... it's mostly a plaything, a sandbox, but a handful of things run "in production" at home and make life around the house slightly more convenient and less risky. By being choosy with the software and a bit aggressive on the container RAM limits, I've got 27 containers running on a Raspberry Pi. Hey, gotta take my bragging rights somewhere.
I took a look, and I have it running with nothing hooked up. I haven't decided which of the remote log-shipping tools I want to hang my hat on. Two docker plugins I tried (Loki and elastic, I think) didn't seem to be compiled for ARMv7, so... maybe I'll try to get benthos streams mode to tail the logs, format them as json, and fire them into the VictoriaLogs webhook. But who knows when I'll figure that out.
I did get a 3-node NATS cluster running across 3 servers this weekend, that was neat how easy that ended up being.
