A homelab is a personal server(s) and supporting equipment set up for the purpose of learning/exploring new technologies, hosting useful services for oneself and others and sometimes just to have fun and push the boundaries of what you can do with enterprise hardware/software in a consumer environment.
If you’re interested in the field of IT and like playing around with tech, then a homelab may be right up your alley! They can come in all shapes and sizes, from an old laptop hosting media files, to a whole server cabinet of gear running virtual machines, docker containers, and much more. Whatever your experience level, you can easily get started and grow your homelab into something useful for you.
I bought the HDHomeRun Flex Duo so I could watch my antenna from anywhere, but also more importantly so that I could record shows that aired at inconvenient times for me. Perhaps I’ll go into more detail on it later, but for now I’ll keep it short.
I’ve been having trouble aiming my junky $25 indoor antenna and needed a way to visualize signal strength. So I hooked up a JSON API from the HDHomeRun into my Telegraf/InfluxDB/Grafana stack and made a dashboard to visualize current signal strength/quality and over time. I like to think it turned out pretty well and it makes aiming the antenna a bit easier too.
More to come from me. Be sure to show off your stuff too!
Here’s part of my current setup. Not pictured is the functional NAS that’s almost full and the new NAS I’m working on that I need to fix the thermals for before I actually start using it.
Decided to go with uFF (micro form factor) optiplexes for my compute since they’re relatively cheap used, have reasonably low power usage, and stack nicely within 2Us. I’m running proxmox as my hypervisor on three of them (red/orange/purple) with a few small containers, but want to get my NAS going first in order to really bolster the storage and capabilities of my homelab.
Those signal strength graphs are pretty sweet! I do love me some influx/grafana but I don’t have much in mine right now, just some stats from my UPSs and proxmox hosts. I’m totally planning on having some sweet setups when I get my other homelab blockers out of the way but heccin work and life priorities man.
Apparently my server did not like some of the changes I made to InfluxDB. Caused InfluxDB and Grafana to pin my entire CPU at 100% and use ~50GB+ of memory. Time for some troubleshooting. Yaaaayyy…
Influxdb does have a tendency to develop memory leaks if you look at it wrong. Ive run into that issue a few times before. Easiest way I’ve found to solve it is by finding a version that doesn’t do that and don’t update.
I’m running InfluxDB v2.5.1 and it’s been consistently under 512MB of RAM usage, but I have it running in a proxmox container with only 4GB of RAM given to it so I don’t know if there’s a scaling aspect to how much it uses
Perhaps it’d be a good idea to put it in its own VM like that. Or at the very least limit it’s RAM/CPU usage in Docker. Prevent a catastrophe like this in the future.
So I’ve been bumping the homelab updates pretty hard lately… I have managed switches, vlans, multiple hosts, just booted up home assistant in a VM… but I need a good open source, preferably virtualbox deployable appliance, network / system / lab topology and monitoring solution… any ideas?
Checkmk is solid and has a huge number of options for configuration. It even includes graphs if you so choose. I’ve used it a lot to get notifications to my phone with Pushover. Matter of fact that in itself has been useful since we have a GFCI breaker that tends to nuisance trip and send one of the UPSs onto battery.
The confusing thing for me was the appliance versus site approach. The documentation for setting up a new site actually doesn’t work if you SSH into the appliance, you have to upload the file via the web management. Other than that, easy enough if you actually read
