Homelab Services Tour 2025 - What am I Self-Hosting — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00It's been another awesome year of self-hosting, and after sharing my Homelab hardware tour,
2. 0:05many of you wanted to know what I'm running on all of that hardware.
3. 0:08Well, you're in luck because today I'm breaking it all down for you.
4. 0:12From dashboards to hypervisors for virtualization, a NAS with plenty of storage,
5. 0:17five DNS servers, yes, five, segmented networks across multiple VLANs,
6. 0:23reverse proxies, home security, media server, link pages, link shorteners, power management,
7. 0:30and so much more. I'll also give you a sneak peek at the services that I'm keeping,
8. 0:35the ones I'm replacing, and some big changes I'm planning this year. Spoiler alert, I've revamped
9. 0:40quite a bit in the last 12 months, and 2025 will be no different. If you're into self-hosting services,
10. 0:47make sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any of my future updates.
11. 0:51All right, let's dive in, starting with my networks. So I have a lot of Ubiquiti devices,
12. 0:55so naturally, I'm going to use the UniFi Network Controller to manage all of my devices,
13. 1:00and some of my cameras, and other things you'll see later on. But in here, you can see my network
14. 1:05typology. Now, first, you can see my fiber coming in right here, and then that connects to my EFG,
15. 1:12and that's my gateway into my network. That was UDM SE before this, but now it's an EFG.
16. 1:20That might go back to something a little bit more home-friendly, but for now, it's the EFG,
17. 1:26because I'm testing it. Then from there, downstream from there, I kind of have my core switch,
18. 1:30and this is my switch aggregation pro, and I see there's a RX fault there, but I'll look at that
19. 1:36later. But this is my 10 gig switch, so all of my 10 gig devices connect into here, and then it uplinks
20. 1:42at 25 gig. So down from this core switch, first I'll go this way, because this goes into my studio
21. 1:49here. In my studio, my first switch is the Pro Max 24 PoE. That's right over there in a mini server
22. 1:55rack for all of my workstations. And then from there, it connects to the Office Flex Mini, which is
23. 2:02up there behind the TV, and that's there so I can connect all of those devices that are up there
24. 2:07to a network and hard-wire them rather than using wireless. And then from here, it should go to this
25. 2:14USW Pro Max 16 PoE, the little short one. That's actually on my workbench back there. I've unplugged
26. 2:21it because I'm tearing things apart back there and kind of redoing my office, but that should be plugged
27. 2:26in. And then downstream from that are two of the 2.5 UniFi Flex switches. And those were there for
28. 2:33testing and updating, but I'll probably remove those and use those somewhere else. So then if we go back
29. 2:40over here again, downstream from my Switch Aggregation Pro, then I have my 48 port PoE switch, and this
30. 2:47connects a majority of my devices. So downstream from this, let's just start over here, is my U7 Outdoor
31. 2:54Pro. And that's outside creating a wireless bridge to my garage. And it's also giving me coverage
32. 3:00outdoors. But it does create a bridge to the device bridge that's in the garage. And that's connected
33. 3:07to the PoE 8 port light, which gives it power and connectivity. And from here, this connects to
34. 3:13a lot of cameras and maybe some more stuff in the future. And I did have this office workbench switch
35. 3:20out there just for testing. But I removed it, I should probably remove it from here and reset it.
36. 3:26But if we go to the next device downstream from my 48 PoE switch, I have the PDU for power management.
37. 3:32I have two flex devices, those are the ones you saw on the wall. And that's just to give me more ports
38. 3:38on the wall. Then I have a living room USW Ultra 210. And so this is a another PoE switch that's in my living
39. 3:47room that's powering some cameras, it's powering a mini switch, the flex switch. And that goes behind
40. 3:53my TV for the Xbox and some devices up there. And then this also powers the U6 mesh, which is that small
41. 4:01little access point that I have in my living room just for some more coverage. And to give my doorbell
42. 4:07some more coverage. That's specifically why I got it. And then connected to there, you might have saw that
43. 4:13U7 Pro on top of my server rack. I meant to mount that a long time ago, but it actually fits nice there.
44. 4:19And it covers some of the devices above there and actually some of the devices outside too. So downstream
45. 4:25from this, I have the USP plug really, it's just connected over wireless. But this is an IoT device from
46. 4:31Ubiquiti that will automatically toggle my ONT on and off. If it detects a problem with my internet connection.
47. 4:38Super handy. I've had it for years and it saved me quite a few times. We talked about the flex. So then next to here
48. 4:45is the U7 Pro Max and that's the access point that's right outside of my office. And it's the access point
49. 4:51that a majority of the devices in my house connect to. It's central, it's the highest up, and it's a really good
50. 4:58access point. So most of my devices end up connecting to this one. And that's it as far as topology goes. If you noticed, I have quite a few VLANs. I have one for
51. 5:05cameras, one for guests, one for main, one for IoT, one for service trusted and one for untrusted. A couple of these went away
52. 5:13because I made some changes. So here's my network setup or the way it used to be. So I have my default network where a lot of my
53. 5:21devices are connected. This is where all of my networking devices live and all of my Ubiquiti devices live. And the only other
54. 5:28devices that live there are devices that need access to all VLANs. So the camera VLAN, pretty self-explanatory. This is where all of my cameras live. And this VLAN is pretty special because I actually blocked the internet from this VLAN.
55. 5:44cameras shouldn't reach out to the internet anyways they should connect back to UniFi Protect
56. 5:49but just in case for some reason they decided to go to the internet one day they're not going to be
57. 5:54able to make it so that's what I do wholesale across this camera vlan because I don't want
58. 6:00any devices on there to ever go out to the internet they have no reason to because I self-host UniFi
59. 6:06protect here then there's the iot vlan which is for all my iot devices and it's also for things
60. 6:12that I don't trust now I use the term trust loosely we'll talk more about what I do trust and what i
61. 6:17don't trust and why I don't trust some things but I don't trust any of my iot devices so they go here
62. 6:24and this is one thing that has changed my Kubernetes node isn't here I actually have a network adapter
63. 6:30here so it's not really a node so I'm going to take that off you'll be happy to know that I moved my
64. 6:36wife's laptop off the iot vlan her work laptop I didn't have a great place to put it I threw it on
65. 6:43the iot vlan but I've taken it off since then and this is where any device goes that I test I should
66. 6:49probably have my own test vlan too that doesn't have access to the internet so that I can really
67. 6:55test it in isolation just in case you know something was compromised or sent to me you know compromised but
68. 7:02uh right now I test them on my iot vlan then there's the main vlan for everything that I trust
69. 7:07and when I say trust it's not that I trust it with my life or anything like that it's more that I trust
70. 7:13this device enough to sign into it to do taxes on it and to you know put my personal information
71. 7:21on that device now would I put my personal information on any of these iot devices like no
72. 7:28and so that's kind of how I think about it I mean you know do I trust my home pods with my life no I don't
73. 7:35obviously but do I trust them enough to talk to them or to sign in with my iCloud account yes I do
74. 7:42uh so this is kind of where those devices live on this main vlan then I have a guest vlan for
75. 7:49everyone who never comes over because I never have any guests it's true and here's one of the biggest
76. 7:55changes from last year I'm not using servers untrusted anymore since setting up my co-location
77. 8:01i moved all of my untrusted servers and some of my public services there so I don't self-host most public
78. 8:10services out of my house anymore so really this whole thing could go over here and then I could
79. 8:17just basically say that hey this is this is my co-location over here so this would be home and this
80. 8:24would be my colo over here so what I ended up doing was creating a site-to-site vpn between my co-location
81. 8:31and my home so that some of my trusted devices can get to them directly and then this can serve out
82. 8:38you know the services through the internet and this is how I ended up doing it I have home I have a site
83. 8:44to site vpn not using tail scale that was one of my decisions and then my co-location and so I just
84. 8:51traversed the network through a site-to-site vpn this is hosting a lot of my public services and then this is
85. 8:57hosting a lot of my internal home lab services here if you want to see some of the decision points and
86. 9:03how things are organized I have a video on that the dashboard that I'm using is home page now I switched
87. 9:08to this this year and home page is great for a lot of reasons one it has a ton of flexibility so you can
88. 9:14customize this the way that you want it supports a lot of services as you can see a lot of them are
89. 9:20connected here that's another point is that you can get data back from those services and present it
90. 9:27here in a little card and it still does the simplest thing which is a link on this page to get to some
91. 9:33of your services but one of the reasons why I like this the most is because it's all configuration based
92. 9:39and what do I mean by that well you can configure everything about this dashboard in yaml now I know a
93. 9:45lot of people don't like yaml and they want a WYSIWYG editor that's totally fine but for me personally
94. 9:51i'd rather do it in yaml because then my yaml file can be easily backed up and it doesn't require
95. 9:58space on the disk where this is running that's really important for things like Kubernetes because
96. 10:04now this runs stateless and you don't need to mount a volume to this container and then you could scale it as
97. 10:10much as you want for example we saw my hypervisor column and then in here you could see all of my pve servers
98. 10:17and then I had these variables in a dot emv file but you can see how simple it is I could copy and paste this a few
99. 10:24times and get a few more Proxmox servers just by doing this then I have a containers column DNS column
100. 10:30so on and so forth so I really like this way to configure stuff rather than using a WYSIWYG editor or drag and drop or anything like that
101. 10:38don't get me wrong they're lovely and they work great but for me I want to be able to repeat this
102. 10:44super easy and keep this configuration say in a configuration store like Kubernetes my hypervisor
103. 10:51of choice is still Proxmox and for a good reason Proxmox is a wonderful hypervisor not only is it open
104. 10:59source and based on kvm but it also has a wonderful web gui to manage all of this it can scale and you can run
105. 11:07it in ha if you want it can run LXC containers and you can run cef to have distributed storage across
106. 11:15all of these hypervisors that you're running in your cluster so lots of great features many of them i
107. 11:20don't even use but I do have four nodes in my Proxmox cluster now I actually have two Proxmox clusters I'll
108. 11:28show you the second one here in a second but this is my first cluster first up I have Storinator and for the time being I converted
109. 11:35Storinator to a Proxmox node rather than installing something on it bare metal because it gives me
110. 11:41all of the niceties from Proxmox like backups and all of that easy to connect to shares so I decided
111. 11:48that hey I'm going to turn that into a Proxmox node and then I can run all of these virtual machines on
112. 11:54here I think that's going to change I think that's going to change and I'll talk about that a little bit
113. 11:57later in the NAS section if that's any clue but on here I have a lot of test machines I actually have a GitHub
114. 12:04runner here I'll talk about that a little bit later I have three GitHub runners that run CI for some of my repos
115. 12:11from GitHub when people open pull requests I have them running here locally I'll talk about it later but pretty cool that I can
116. 12:18run and execute CI from GitHub the public version and run those runners here locally and then I have
117. 12:25five test K3S nodes I'll talk about that a little bit later and what they're for and then I have pbs
118. 12:31running so Proxmox backup server running as a virtual machine I'll kind of dive into that a little bit later
119. 12:36then some DNS servers and some other servers just for testing you can see I was testing Unraid here true
120. 12:42nas it's wonderful that I can actually test other nas systems on Proxmox it's pretty awesome and this
121. 12:48is Unraid I was actually passing through the usb key where my production version of unraid was installed
122. 12:55and that was one quick way I was able to virtualize it was just plug in that key pass it to to the virtual
123. 13:00machine and I didn't need to configure anything else so the next three nodes are those Intel nux you saw
124. 13:06that I said I have in a cluster and each of them are running similar VMs or containers that the other
125. 13:13ones are running so for instance if I look at HA Proxy one on this node one or if I look at HA Proxy
126. 13:19two on node two or HA Proxy three on node three so what I've done is spread these out for ha and on my
127. 13:28one node for Proxmox I put all of my one guest machines the same for two and then the same for three
128. 13:35so this really helps me coordinate shutdowns so for instance if I wanted to use Ansible to patch all of
129. 13:40the three devices I know that all of the three devices live on this Proxmox node 3 so I'll run my
130. 13:47Ansible command to update all of these machines and then I'll update the host so xing-3 and then I'll
131. 13:55reboot it and then they'll come back up and because this is ha for the most part these services will stay
132. 14:01running and so I use that convention pretty much anywhere because I'll always know that if it's a
133. 14:06dash or one it's going to live on node one node two and node three and so on and so forth um but HA Proxy
134. 14:13this was for testing Postgres was for testing and then you'll see here I have my K8S home
135. 14:19oh one and my K8S home worker oh one so this is one of my three Kubernetes clusters we'll talk about
136. 14:27that a little bit later but this is the server node or the node that has etcd and control plane for Kubernetes
137. 14:34that's the dash oh one and then the dash oh two on node two is also that role and the same for three on node
138. 14:43three this dash three is running Kubernetes etcd and control plane so those three nodes just manage
139. 14:51this Kubernetes cluster in the state and the api and then on each of them I have worker nodes that pick
140. 14:58up some of the pods that I deploy to them so as I deploy services through Kubernetes they'll just land
141. 15:04on one of these nodes which nodes I don't really care as long as it lands on one of them and then if this
142. 15:09node goes down you know it'll shuffle those around and continue on working my second Proxmox cluster
143. 15:17is actually in my co-location so I move those three 1u servers to my co-location and each of those three
144. 15:241u servers are running Proxmox and then within each one of these I'm running different VMs and LXC
145. 15:31containers that's a big change this year too so let's talk about these three again I have the same convention
146. 15:38here node one as Postgres one HA Proxy one MongoDB one MySQL one Rancher one DNS one K8S public one
147. 15:49and K8S public worker one it's a lot going on there and the same for two same exact thing and the
148. 15:55same for three as you can see now I don't know if I mentioned this but last year I was running a lot of
149. 16:00my databases in Kubernetes now there's nothing inherently wrong with running databases in Kubernetes
150. 16:06if it's architected the right way I didn't architect mine the right way and the biggest takeaway from
151. 16:13this is to not use a database in a shared service server so as you can see I have a lot of virtual
152. 16:21machines in here and a lot of things that are sensitive to latency databases are one and etcd is
153. 16:28another and so I had databases running in Kubernetes on this host that's also hosting all of these
154. 16:35containers and virtual machines so not a great mix if I had more machines what I would do is just
155. 16:42dedicate a couple of nodes specifically to databases and let the databases run there then they don't
156. 16:49have to worry about competing for cpu and io and network they could have their own dedicated per node so
157. 16:56anyways I i learned a ton I learned that hey if I want to run databases in Kubernetes I need some more
158. 17:02hardware or at least better hardware if these were all on NVMe it'd probably work which i'd love to do
159. 17:08in the future and I'm thinking about doing it but anyways on this first node I have Postgres sql so this
160. 17:14is the first node in this Postgres cluster and if you want to see how to configure Postgres ha I have a great
161. 17:20video on it doesn't use Docker doesn't use Kubernetes I called it Postgres sql the hard way
162. 17:26kind of you know a tip in my hat to Kubernetes the hard way because this is really the step-by-step
163. 17:34manual way of showing you how to do it for Postgres so if you need a database and something supports
164. 17:39Postgres always choose Postgres it's great but anyways I have node 1 2 and 3 and this is ha I can shut this LXC
165. 17:46container down and my databases will continue to run HAProxy is actually a proxy in front of Postgres to
166. 17:54kind of you know field those requests and send them to the nodes that are alive and the same thing I have
167. 18:011 2 and 3 this 2 is actually down there's something weird going on where I can't start it so I don't
168. 18:07know I'm gonna have to restore it or delete it I probably should have done that already but as you can see
169. 18:12i mean one is down right now and HAProxy is handling it just fine one and three up actually
170. 18:18with HAProxy you only need two nodes for high availability but that's besides the point I did three
171. 18:24just because I have three nodes anyways that aside it runs great then I have Mongodb if you're not
172. 18:31familiar with Mongodb it's really a no sql database and so it doesn't use sql at all it uses documents
173. 18:39but it's pretty popular among javascript developers and for things that aren't relational actually
174. 18:46can do relational stuff now and at the same time relational databases can do schema-less or no
175. 18:53sql type databases too with documents it's all crazy they're just intermingling now but anyways I use
176. 18:59that for a lot of my external services and some of my internal services too so again I have three of them
177. 19:05one two three this is ha could take one down pass it around and then you know one will get promoted
178. 19:13and my services will continue to run same with MySQL full disclosure this isn't working exactly
179. 19:20the way I want it to MySQL is a little bit harder to do than Mongo and Postgres so full
180. 19:27disclosure this isn't fully working I'm not going to pretend like it is but eventually I will move my
181. 19:33my MySQL stuff to hear and you're probably saying to yourself right now why isn't he using
182. 19:37MariaDB why is he using MySQL well MariaDB used to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL
183. 19:44now they started diverging so MariaDB is doing some things that MySQL isn't doing and some
184. 19:52services that I use only are tested with MySQL and I've already found some services that don't work with
185. 19:59MariaDB and it goes back and forth you might find some services that were built and tested with MariaDB
186. 20:06but don't work with MySQL db so we're in a weird situation right here and I don't blame the
187. 20:12developers of those services they have limited staff and they can't test every single database and so
188. 20:18they're only going to certify or ensure that their service runs fine on the database of their choice so in the future I'm probably going to have a MariaDB database in here too
189. 20:27uh as soon as I run a service that says they only test with that but anyways I plan to fix this I just
190. 20:35haven't had time yet then you'll see I have Rancher Rancher 01 and then Rancher 02 Rancher 03 so this is my Rancher cluster we'll talk about it a little bit later but I have three Kubernetes clusters all managed with Rancher and these are the three VMs that help me do it next I have DNS01 so I have DNS01
191. 20:55uh so I have DNS01 I don't have DNS02 on two which is kind of weird so I should probably move it and shuffle that around
192. 21:02uh but I have DNS02 and I have two DNS servers here I'm going to talk about what I'm using for DNS a little bit later
193. 21:11uh but just know in my colo I have my own DNS servers there too next I have K8S public 01 again this is a another Kubernetes cluster and this is for all of my public services my self-hosted services
194. 21:23hosted services that I provide for people like you so my documentation some other stuff apis used to have wiki
195. 21:29js but I have a lot of things out there in the public that I want to host and so those run on this cluster
196. 21:36right here and then like my home cluster so the dash one dash two dash three are really for managing Kubernetes
197. 21:44it's Kubernetes itself so it's etcd control plane are running on those three servers so it's managing the state of Kubernetes
198. 21:51Kubernetes as well as having the api for kube control commands then I have three worker nodes one on each
199. 21:59Proxmox node and that's where all of my user services run so my documentation is running on there right now
200. 22:06if you go to my documentation you'll actually get routed to one of three of these because I run three
201. 22:12replicas so my documentation is ha and I run three replicas and there should be one on each one of
202. 22:19these nodes so where you get sent to I don't know but I know it'll be one of the three and then i
203. 22:25have you know templates other random VMs and you know all of my shares connected but this is my second
204. 22:31Proxmox cluster in my co-location and since I was lucky enough to get a co-location and put my service there
205. 22:38that's where I put a lot of my public services too and that's what helped shape my home network
206. 22:43down so I don't need that untrusted server vlan anymore because I only have trusted servers there
207. 22:49because all of the public stuff that I'm hosting is in my co-location so so a lot of changes over the
208. 22:54last year and more to come for sure that is a lot on hypervisors and a lot on Proxmox because I love
209. 23:01Proxmox it's awesome but there's one more thing with Proxmox it's not Proxmox itself but it's Proxmox
210. 23:06backup server so I use Proxmox backup server to back up all of my machines and this Proxmox backup server
211. 23:13lives in a virtual machine on my machine back here at home the cool thing is is that I have it configured
212. 23:21as a target for both my co-location machines and my machines here at home so you can see I created two data
213. 23:29stores TrueNAS dc and TrueNAS home so TrueNAS that's the name of where the storage lives so it's living on
214. 23:37TrueNAS over nfs it's a little bit of a hack but it works great might change it in a little bit but not
215. 23:44important I have a data store that's stored on TrueNAS for my data center and one for home and you can see
216. 23:51I'm not too bad so the data center is using 504 gigabytes and home is using 2.62 terabytes now you
217. 24:01can tweak your backups with garbage collection jobs prune jobs tell it how many you want to keep how
218. 24:07many you want to let go and how often all of those jobs run but the cool thing about it is it de-duplicates
219. 24:14a lot of this too so even though I have what 504 gigs that's used in this data store I think if i
220. 24:21restored that it'd be a lot lot more than that because a lot of things are de-duplicated like
221. 24:27things in the os and stuff like that I think that's how it works but yeah it works great and if you're
222. 24:33curious about what it can and can't do I got a short video on it just explaining an overview of how to do
223. 24:38it and how I set mine up as for storage I'm using TrueNAS for all of my storage services that means
224. 24:45smb nfs I scuzzy and even object storage and I'm running the electric eel version which means I have
225. 24:52Docker for apps instead of Kubernetes but you can see some of my stats about my nas I have a 128 gigs of
226. 24:59ram I have a pretty okay cpu in here it's a bronze Intel xeon it only has six cores running at 1.9
227. 25:07gigahertz now that's great for power usage it's a low power Intel if there's such a thing but
228. 25:14it's pretty good on power all things considered and I do need a xeon because I need all of those lanes
229. 25:20could be amd but I'm just saying I need a server grade processor so I get all of these lanes for all
230. 25:26of these devices in here so if you want to see how my discs are laid out I think we can go right here but
231. 25:33i have five mirrors that are too wide so I have mirrored v devs and I have five of them so I have
232. 25:3910 14 terabyte drives in there and so I'm kind of losing half of my storage because I'm using mirrored
233. 25:45v devs but I did that because it's easy to expand my pool by just adding two more drives and that's why
234. 25:52i did it plus some performance reasons even though it's kind of expensive you know every time I need to
235. 25:57add more storage you gotta buy two drives and I get half of that storage I decided that you know
236. 26:02that's best for me for right now kind of committed to this because I don't have a really good way to
237. 26:09move that data off to something else you know I don't have 40 terabytes somewhere where I can move
238. 26:14this off and then change my layout and move it back on so I'm kind of you know stuck with it for a
239. 26:20little bit but there might be something in the future that could change to where I can do that so
240. 26:25anyways but you can see I have a log v dev or my slog so I have a mirror two wide and that's a
241. 26:32112 gigabyte Intel Optane drives and I have those mirrored and then a cache drive which I probably don't
242. 26:41need but I put them in there anyways I have two of those as well no spare v devs and nothing for
243. 26:47dedupe so it's you know a pretty standard installation you can see here you know mirror mirror mirror
244. 26:55mirror and then two cache drives and then my log or my slog is also mirrored and I think I'm going to
245. 27:03optimize this in the future and move my metadata off the main pool just so I can get some better
246. 27:10performance when I open up folders that have you know hundreds of files I notice it kind of crawls
247. 27:15but I do have folders that have hundreds of thousands of files inside of them so I think
248. 27:20moving my metadata to a group of super fast drives that will help speed up some performance I don't
249. 27:26know we'll see I have two 10 gig NICs on here and they're bonded and set up in a LAGG as far as
250. 27:32applications go I only have one application running on here right now and that's Minio or Min IO and
251. 27:38that's object storage and so if you think of things like S3 or Google Cloud storage GCS or whatever Azure
252. 27:46has for storage it's really just S3 or object storage and this is the open source self-hosted
253. 27:53version and so this is really handy because a lot of my backups or a lot of my services at least in
254. 27:58Kubernetes or containers they always like to back up to object storage which is awesome I agree it should be
255. 28:03object storage and so I want to host that myself and so I host it with Minio now Minio used to be on
256. 28:10TrueNAS proper it wasn't an application and then they took it off and now it is an application which
257. 28:15i think is the right way to go too I'm most likely going to move all of my home production services here
258. 28:23and that's something I'll talk about a little bit later too but the gist of it is I want
259. 28:29something a little bit more simple for my home production I want to make sure that when I hit a
260. 28:34button for Home Assistant it's going to work I want to make sure that Plex is always up and running and
261. 28:40the highest available of all of my servers is my nas if my nas is down there's big problems you know I do
262. 28:48everything possible to keep my nas up and it should be always running in my environment and so since my
263. 28:53nas is always running I figure some of my home lab services in my home production should run here too
264. 29:00and by home production I mean all of the services that I need and rely on and depend on and my home lab
265. 29:07stuff that runs on my knock and elsewhere are things that can be down and no one will notice that's kind of how i
266. 29:12separate it if I'm running services and they're down and someone notices you know then I should
267. 29:18consider that home production so I'm going to move all of them here another reason why I do it too is
268. 29:23because well I get easy snapshots I get a lot of caching and performance that I get from my TrueNAS stuff
269. 29:29at least I think I do with TrueNAS I need to look into that but I've done so much to optimize my TrueNAS
270. 29:36server and now that they have Docker it just totally makes sense to put all of my containers running here
271. 29:41and I'm pretty excited for it I really am now that we're past hypervisors and backups now it's time for
272. 29:47DNS the DNS that I am still using is PiHole I don't see any reason to change it anytime soon I know that
273. 29:56UniFi Network can now manage CNAMEs and do DNS for you and there are other DNS systems out there but
274. 30:04I'm super comfortable with PiHole it lets me easily create DNS records cname records and I can replicate
275. 30:11those across all of my nodes with Gravity Sync now I know that there are better things out there but
276. 30:18i like PiHole and it works really good gives me easy way to disable stuff gives me an easy way to
277. 30:25see which domains are being used gives me an easy way to block domains I get ad lists I get a lot of
278. 30:31stuff and it works really really good so I don't see a reason to change I kind of want to keep things
279. 30:37semi-simple at home because I'm a person of one so PiHole is just that for me it works great I can't
280. 30:44complain and so the way that I have my DNS set up I have actually I have three DNS systems here at home
281. 30:51so I have you know DNS1 DNS2 and dn S3 and then I use kube-vip to create a virtual ip for my second DNS it's
282. 31:01it's a little wild but there's a method to my madness so if you look at it think of this like this is my
283. 31:09primary DNS so it's 192.168.60.10 and then the vip that keepalived creates
284. 31:18is my second DNS that I hand out in my DHCP scope and so this one is actually .22 so let me
285. 31:26label this one two three so the reason I did this is because these two right here are actually virtual
286. 31:36machines within my home lab well if that big server rack goes down or I reboot my hypervisors or whatever
287. 31:44the thing tips over or gets disconnected normally that would mean I don't have DNS but number three
288. 31:51will save the day because this is on the wall and this is a pi zero and it's running PiHole and this vip
289. 32:00will still be up but now the traffic will be routed to here so it gives me a super simple low power way
290. 32:06to still serve out DNS if my whole entire server rack goes down which it happens you know I need to
291. 32:11reboot stuff or accidentally unplug stuff so that's why I did that but then to make matters even more
292. 32:18confusing what I ended up doing in my co-location is spinning up two more PiHole servers and think of this
293. 32:26really like four and five so this is what I was saying I have five DNS servers but what I realized
294. 32:34is that if I have a vpn connection to these you know I might need to access the same DNS records here at home
295. 32:44and here in my co-location what I ended up doing is running Gravity Sync and synchronizing everything over
296. 32:53so really one is my primary DNS and this is where I make all of my changes so I make all of my changes
297. 33:01here then Gravity Sync will push these changes out to all of these machines so I had to do very little
298. 33:09besides spin these up and set up Gravity Sync and just tell it hey number one is the source of truth
299. 33:16so it's pretty awesome it shares lists shares DNS records shares c names so it works out really really
300. 33:22good so this is why I have five DNS servers I think it worked out pretty good I mean you know this is
301. 33:27like me hacking and homelabbing and trying to do a colo at the same time I think it turned out pretty
302. 33:32good I do wish that PiHole had first class support for this maybe in version two but to be able to
303. 33:38run these you know in a cluster and be able to easily synchronize them would be great but in the meantime
304. 33:44we have tools to do this so the only thing I have to keep telling myself is never make changes on any of these
305. 33:50these always make my changes on one and those will replicate out so pretty fun it's been fun figuring
306. 33:57out all this with PiHole it's pretty versatile as you can see for home security I'm using UniFi Protect
307. 34:03huge fan of UniFi Protect it's such a great application and on top of that you know the cameras are
308. 34:10relatively cheap for what you get and on top of that it's all local so all of this is recording local on my
309. 34:17nvr now I used to have that UDM SE that had one drive in there but I ended up buying an nvr and that
310. 34:24has four drives so you can see that my storage capacity right now is going back 33 days it's
311. 34:31pretty good I need to add another drive in here and I could probably get some more storage but 33 days for
312. 34:36almost 10 cameras is pretty good you know and not only does it keep these recordings local but a lot of them
313. 34:42have smart oh you can oh you can see right here I hooked a camera up to my 3D printer so I'm printing
314. 34:48a spool right now and not only does all of this stay local I also get AI features like object detection
315. 34:54and facial recognition and stuff like that with these cameras so huge huge fan of protect it just keeps
316. 35:01getting better now containers are a huge topic so I'm gonna break this up into two sections first we're gonna
317. 35:07have containers or the engine that I use and run and then we'll have orchestration basically Kubernetes
318. 35:13spoiler alert but with containers I actually made a big change this year and moved stuff back to Docker
319. 35:21for a long time I was going all in with Kubernetes at home and since I was hosting things at home and since
320. 35:28I was also hosting my public services at home it got pretty complicated pretty quick you know I always had
321. 35:34to be sure that I was deploying things to the right vlan or to the right node to be sure that hey this is
322. 35:41the public facing service and not an internal service and I did a pretty good job at it but I realized it was
323. 35:47just getting way too complicated now I manage a lot of clusters at work and I still manage all of my
324. 35:53public services with Kubernetes those three clusters that I have and some of my home services
325. 35:59but I decided that my home production now is going to be Docker along with less comPlexity there are
326. 36:05actually less points of failure now too if you think about it with Kubernetes it could be one of any no
327. 36:11those points of failure and so I ended up creating a virtual machine in Proxmox that has all of my
328. 36:38containers running so this is my home production right now virtual machine running Docker on Proxmox
329. 36:44that's going to change here in a little bit and even though I'm showing you Portainer I manage all of
330. 36:50this with Docker Compose now I use Portainer every now and then just to see how things are doing or to
331. 36:55look at the logs but for the most part I SSH into that machine and then manage them there so there you
332. 37:03can see I have my AI stack we'll talk about that a little bit later my Home Assistant stack still
333. 37:08going to talk about that home page which we talked about Plex which we're going to talk about too
334. 37:14Portainer, Scrypted we'll talk about Tautulli, Traefik, and Watchtower so these are all stacks that
335. 37:20are running on that virtual machine but soon as I mentioned earlier I'm going to be moving all of these
336. 37:25containers over to TrueNAScale so since TrueNAScale has containers now and has Docker support and not
337. 37:32Kubernetes I'm going to put all my containers there and I mentioned that earlier but I wanted to make it
338. 37:38clear that I'll no longer have a vm running Docker on it I'm moving all of that to TrueNAScale and
339. 37:43running that there so it's only one point of failure and that nas has pretty good uptime because if that
340. 37:50nas is down there are lots of problems so lots of migrations still yet to come and for container
341. 37:55orchestration I'm using Kubernetes how'd you guess but I am using Kubernetes I have three Kubernetes
342. 38:02clusters we talked about a little bit earlier and I'm using Rancher to manage all of that so how does
343. 38:07that work well I made a lot of changes to my Kubernetes clusters this year especially so my Rancher
344. 38:14cluster is running RKE2 and it's upstream of everything else so if you think about it I installed
345. 38:20RKE2 then I started running Rancher on there and then from there I provisioned more clusters downstream
346. 38:28so I have my home cluster downstream and I have my public cluster downstream but this is really cool
347. 38:34about Rancher is that I can manage all three of these clusters right from here and so I have a single
348. 38:40pane of glass to manage all of my clusters if I wanted to do something like make a single node
349. 38:47cluster on my store nader after I move everything out of there which I might do I easily could a cluster
350. 38:53of one give it all rolls and then I manage it here from Rancher so pretty awesome now I will say that i
351. 38:59use this ui basically for read only this is just my dashboard to inspect things really quick or to quickly
352. 39:06kill a pod or anything like that but it's an easy way for me to see how my cluster is doing
353. 39:11for mobile or from web without SSH-ing into those machines I use GitOps to manage the state of my
354. 39:18cluster and I'll talk about that here in a little bit but I'm a huge fan of Rancher even if I had a
355. 39:23cluster of one I probably would install Rancher on it just because I get so many features from it and I get
356. 39:29so much visibility from it and it's so accessible through a website now I know a lot of people are going to
357. 39:34say it uses a lot of resources yeah but I get a lot of use out of those resources I get a lot of value
358. 39:40out of installing it and managing clusters and now I'm managing three clusters pretty soon it'll be four
359. 39:45clusters and so doing it this way or at least provisioning those clusters with Rancher and having
360. 39:52them all report back to Rancher is awesome it's golden I love doing it and upgrades are super simple too
361. 39:58but I do a lot of that with GitOps too so just think of Rancher at least for me as a way to create and
362. 40:04manage new Kubernetes clusters and when I say manage I don't mean manage deployments I mean manage nodes
363. 40:11add remove nodes things like that so in my home cluster are all of my home containers so it's some
364. 40:17of the services you've already seen some that you will see and then it's a test bed for a lot of my other Kubernetes stuff
365. 40:24public is where all of my public services are running so these are things that are publicly available to
366. 40:30really anyone and then obviously as I mentioned a few time I have my Rancher cluster which manages the
367. 40:36state of all of the clusters and it's an easy way to create new clusters you know for example if I wanted
368. 40:42to create a cluster I could click create there I could say hey it's going to be a harvester or a custom cluster
369. 40:50custom is probably what I want I would choose my Kubernetes version RKE2 or K3S you know choose the one I want
370. 40:58and then I would choose a unique name so I would call it test
371. 41:03and then I would click create I'm not going to do it and then from there it would give you a couple cli commands to run on
372. 41:10any Linux machine and they'll automatically join the cluster and give it the roles that you tell it so
373. 41:16super easy to create a Kubernetes cluster once you have this running and the other kind of containers i
374. 41:21now run are LXC containers so what are LXC containers well they're lightweight Linux containers that
375. 41:28actually share the kernel with Linux so they're not totally isolated but you can think of them as simple
376. 41:35lightweight virtual machines that's the way I like to think about them but it actually shares the kernel
377. 41:40the kernel with the host that it's on so super awesome super fast so if you don't like Docker containers
378. 41:46or cri containers where you're basically isolating an application LXC might be for you because you can
379. 41:53create an LXC container install what you want and manage it almost exactly like a vm but with a fraction of the
380. 41:59resources so I talked about this a little bit earlier and what they are but my HA Proxy Mongodb these are all
381. 42:05containers right here that I'm running right on Proxmox so super cool if you want an easy way to
382. 42:11create containers or virtual machines you check out Proxmox helper scripts I have a video on it super
383. 42:16awesome if you're new to Proxmox it's great or even if you know everything about Proxmox it's still really
384. 42:21awesome to be able to run these scripts to create a lot of these services so check it out I have a video on it
385. 42:26so get ops is a huge topic and if you don't know what get ops is it's really just a practice that says
386. 42:32that your git repo should be the source of truth and so what people like to do is create infrastructure
387. 42:40as code so what they'll do is write code which is their infrastructure and they'll use a CI process
388. 42:47to deploy that out to whatever the system is and so a good example of this is with Kubernetes so if i
389. 42:53want to for example deploy home page right here in my home cluster this is how I do it I would commit this
390. 43:00resource to my GitHub repo I would push it up and then there's a CI process that will deploy that and so
391. 43:08what you end up doing is not really managing your cluster through a ui or through manual convention
392. 43:15you do it all through git so really your git repo becomes the source of truth rather than the cluster
393. 43:21itself and this is why I was saying earlier with Rancher I don't make any changes in the Rancher ui
394. 43:27i make changes to yaml deploy that yaml push it up in a commit and then the process will take over which
395. 43:35is Flux and apply those changes so Flux is what I use for GitOps it's pretty awesome there's also
396. 43:41ArgoCD which is really awesome I just got into Flux really early and so I'm still here on Flux I do want
397. 43:48to check out ArgoCD I don't really want to rewrite a lot of this though for ArgoCD maybe I'll do it for
398. 43:55my public cluster because there's less running there but really cool I do wish there was GitOps for
399. 44:00Docker it's kind of seems like an oxymoron doing production stuff with Docker Compose but I wish there
400. 44:06was a way to do GitOps with Docker Compose because I think that would you know satisfy both of my needs
401. 44:11uh for wanting to keep things simple and doing Docker and yaml but at the same time using my git repo as the source of truth
402. 44:19and then having that deploy some way so it totally is something that no one should ever build but I would love it if someone did
403. 44:27and then along with GitOps I actually use a tool called Renovate to help me manage my updates and it's really cool so I self host this thing from mend called Renovate and it's a bot that's running in my cluster and that bot will go out and check
404. 44:43and check some of the resources that I have and see if there are newer versions of those resources so for example if you could see on get home page I'm using version 0.10.19
405. 44:54but if we look at the last change right here you can see I got a pull request from techno boto that's my bot
406. 45:01to make a change and this change is replace this line right here with this line and you can see the container image went from 0.10.6
407. 45:10to 0.10.9 and so it saw that there was an update in this container opened up a pull request and then I got a pull request from this bot and all I have to do is approve it
408. 45:22that's what's cool about git ops 2 so after I approved and merged in that PR the GitOps process takes over and it will deploy the latest version of this container so it's really awesome I don't need to manage updates anymore
409. 45:35at least not in conventional ways I wait for a pull request from a bot that shows me not only the
410. 45:42version but also some of the differences if there's differences in the chainsaw and then I get to decide
411. 45:48whether I want to update it or not and I do that all from a mobile device or web page just saying yes
412. 45:54approve and a couple minutes later you know I get the latest version of container so it's another reason why I love
413. 45:59get us but I use Renovate to do that for my reverse proxy I'm still running Traefik now I think I have
414. 46:06four instances of Traefik running so I have Traefik running on my Docker machine to serve all of my
415. 46:12traffic over https along with certificates for all of my home and home production stuff then I think I have
416. 46:20three or four instances of Traefik within Kubernetes and those are for different things like I have an
417. 46:27internal version of Traefik running in Kubernetes to serve traffic you know to me over the vpn versus out
418. 46:35publicly and then I have another instance of Traefik that's used for a reverse proxy to serve that traffic out
419. 46:42publicly with certificates now that's a lot of information and if you don't know what a reverse
420. 46:49proxy is at its core a reverse proxy is a proxy that takes requests and will send those requests based on
421. 46:58their http headers to downstream services if you think about it you could have your reverse proxy in front of
422. 47:06different services like TrueNAS or Proxmox or Rancher and so that's what's handling those requests and as
423. 47:14they come in it will look at the header and see where it should be routed and then route it accordingly
424. 47:20according to your configuration so you know it's a reverse proxy because if you think of a forward proxy
425. 47:26you know everyone coming together and going through one thing well this is reverse it's everyone coming in
426. 47:33and then going out to different things so I love Traefik I've been running it for a long time I run
427. 47:38it in Docker now and three or four on Kubernetes it's great in the Docker version I use Traefik to get
428. 47:44my certificates from let's encrypt using cloudflare let's encrypt and that works great for Docker in
429. 47:52Kubernetes I'm using cert manager to manage my certificates and all that's really doing is saying hey
430. 47:58Traefik isn't responsible for getting and storing my certificates cert manager is so cert manager will
431. 48:05actually do that it will go out request new certificates pull them down put them as configuration
432. 48:12within Kubernetes and then Traefik can use those since it's a shared resource within Kubernetes so in
433. 48:19Docker I use Traefik to get and manage certificates in Kubernetes I use cert manager to do it but then
434. 48:27they're still used by Traefik so a little bit of nuance there monitoring and logging and I wish I had
435. 48:34a better story for this so last time I was saying yeah I want to do more monitoring logging don't we all
436. 48:40and at that time I was using Uptime Kuma to monitor some of my services especially my internal services and
437. 48:47now that my internal services are kind of all spread out I took down Uptime Kuma and I'm not actually
438. 48:54monitoring anything internal I know that's bad I wait for someone to scream but for external
439. 49:01services I monitor all of those with uptime robot so I don't need to worry about my public services being
440. 49:07monitored I still want to monitor some of my internal services now I did stop using Uptime Kuma even though
441. 49:13it's great had nothing to do with it itself although it does get slow sometimes I mainly stopped using it
442. 49:19because it uses a sqlite database and that sqlite database required storage in Kubernetes which is
443. 49:28kind of a nightmare and that storage would either get corrupted or that storage would disconnect from my
444. 49:34pods and it would be down so the last time I used it it did get corrupted and I said I'm not using it anymore
445. 49:40so now that it's going to Docker and it's going to live on my nas yeah I'll probably end up using it
446. 49:46again it's just that Kubernetes made it a little bit complicated and I think there's a version of uptime
447. 49:52kuma now coming that uses MariaDB which I'm excited about because it means the state of your Uptime Kuma now
448. 50:00lives in a database versus a sqlite database that's on disk so much better architecture coming in the
449. 50:08future looking forward to that I did use Gatus for a little bit and it's a great monitoring system a
450. 50:13little bit different than Uptime Kuma I think it has more of a developer lens on it but the nice thing
451. 50:18about Gatus is that it's stateless so you manage all of the configuration and code with yaml and that will
452. 50:24configure all of your uptime monitors that way so you're not doing it through a ui so pretty cool for
453. 50:29Kubernetes because you can use a config map for the configuration and then it's totally stateless and
454. 50:35then you can scale it and you don't need to worry about storage but since I moved a lot of my home
455. 50:40prod services out of my home Kubernetes cluster I didn't have a use for Gatus for monitoring internally
456. 50:47anymore so anyways a lot to figure out there if you want something that's cool and different Gatus is
457. 50:53the way to go I have a video too for data visualization I'm embarrassed to say I'm not using Grafana
458. 50:58now I've used a lot of those tools at work in the past and I kind of decided that I don't want to use those
459. 51:04tools here at home too now I might set those up for my co-location because that's a little bit different
460. 51:10that's running Kubernetes but for here at home I ended up finding out that Home Assistant is actually
461. 51:17really good to monitor and visualize some of your services at home now I'm not talking about monitoring the
462. 51:24temperature or humidity in your home lab I'm talking about monitoring things like Proxmox
463. 51:30TrueNAS Docker you name it as a quick example I set up a quick dashboard with Plex with PiHole with
464. 51:37TrueNAS and even some of the services that are running on TrueNAS and I can manage it all from here
465. 51:43so if I wanted to turn FTP on and off right here I could or if I wanted to see who's watching something
466. 51:49on Plex I definitely could or to see PiHole or quickly toggle it off to get around the PiHole
467. 51:57blocking system and then toggle it back on when I'm done so there are lots of services that are already
468. 52:03compatible with Home Assistant and a lot of these do charting too for instance I created a network
469. 52:09dashboard and these are all of my network devices so my efg my access points my switches and you can
470. 52:17see right here I created this little chart to see how many clients are connected to each one of these
471. 52:22wireless devices so on this one there's 13 on this one there's 26 and on this one there's five and there's
472. 52:30a lot you can do this is only kind of scratching the surface I think I might continue to use this
473. 52:35uh really because it puts all of this data in Home Assistant which I'm already using and I have an app
474. 52:42for it so pretty cool I'm going to see if I can make some pretty cool dashboards too I have a video
475. 52:47on this covering all of this it's it's really cool if you want to use Home Assistant for something like
476. 52:52that um it's definitely better than nothing is it as advanced as Grafana and loki no not at all and
477. 52:59I'm looking for simplicity along with a good user interface and so Home Assistant gives me all of
478. 53:05that so speaking of home automation all of my home automation is running on Home Assistant one of the
479. 53:12biggest changes I made this year was moving it out of Kubernetes and into Docker and then this year
480. 53:18I'll be moving it from a Docker vm on to TrueNAS itself but Home Assistant need I see more I mean I can
481. 53:25remote control everything in my house I keep adding more and more things to Home Assistant and it seems
482. 53:31like every day there are more and more services that are being added you can see a list of services that
483. 53:37i have configured here and some of the entities that I have configured and then from here you can see
484. 53:42quite a few devices that are connected so my goal is to connect everything to Home Assistant and then if I need to do things downstream from there I will what do I mean by that well my wife and I use a lot of
485. 53:53what do I mean by that well my wife and I use home kit and it's nice to have you know the home app on apple
486. 53:58or tell Siri to do stuff and the way that I do that is connect all the devices to Home Assistant first and
487. 54:04then expose them to home kit with home kit bridge and so all of the non-certified devices I can get into here
488. 54:11and expose them as certified devices so that gives us some more automation like with apple TVs or Siri and stuff like that
489. 54:19uh but for the most part I try to get everything in Home Assistant first and I've been managing some of
490. 54:23my more comPlex automations here so yeah last year it was only kind of being used for a few things now
491. 54:30everything's in here I mean you can see my 3D printer is in here right now I mean that's that's how far it's
492. 54:36going so I am going to continue to use this more and more like I said not only for home automation but for some of my
493. 54:44monitoring of some of my home lab services so really cool I love Home Assistant it just keeps getting
494. 54:49better and better I talked a little bit earlier about home security and I just talked about home
495. 54:55assistant and there's kind of something that's in between which I use which is Scrypted so Scrypted can
496. 55:01be an mbr but the way I like to look at it is it's a system or an interface that allows you to connect
497. 55:08most any camera to most any hub and what do I mean by that well I have my cameras provided by UniFi right
498. 55:17UniFi Protect and they're not home kit certified which means they don't integrate with home kit at all so
499. 55:24when someone presses the doorbell I don't get a notification on apple TV or on Siri or anything like that
500. 55:30and so what Scrypted can do is connect all of your cameras to a hub of your choice now I know it can
501. 55:35connect to home kit I think it can Google Home Alexa and a lot of these are supported and a lot of
502. 55:41different camera systems are supported so anyways I use this to get those video feeds into there for
503. 55:48other reasons but I use Scrypted to do it it's open source it's awesome Scrypted can also be used as an
504. 55:54mvr too so really cool piece of open source software for a link page I use my link page still and it's
505. 56:02Little Link and this is an open source project that I host on GitHub a lot of people have contributed to
506. 56:07it but if you ever find yourself needing to host a bunch of links you can do it with this it's a Docker
507. 56:13container that runs super small lightweight and it's all configurable with environment variables so you
508. 56:20have to do very little pass in a couple environment variables and you get buttons that you can click
509. 56:25on to go different places for a link shortener I still use Shlink now Shlink is open source
510. 56:32self-hostable and I can create a whole bunch of urls and then shorten them with my custom domain
511. 56:38you don't know what I'm talking about think bitly but self-hosted open source and hosted within my
512. 56:45infrastructure you can create as many links as you want and send them wherever you want and you also
513. 56:50get some counts and metrics about those links I've looked at a lot in this space and this is the most
514. 56:56modern and I think the most well architected system that's out there uses Postgres on the database
515. 57:01they've separated the api from the client like this is production ready and I use it in production and so
516. 57:07most of my links that you see the l.technotim.live.docs will take you to my documentation page and so that's
517. 57:14helpful if I ever need to change a link let's say one day I don't want to host my docs on technotim.live
518. 57:20anymore change that boom it's done everywhere so it's great to run even if you need to manage just
519. 57:25a few links for my media server I'm using Plex I don't need to tell you how awesome Plex is but i
520. 57:31think it's really awesome especially for recording live TV and over the air TV and I've been doing that for
521. 57:38for many many years going back to windows xp media center edition so I have a long history of recording
522. 57:44over the air TV and I do it here too so that hd home run quad gives me four tuners or four separate
523. 57:52channels if you will to record different channels within Plex and I can also stream up to four although i
524. 57:58only use one the other cool thing about recording TV is that you can skip commercials it'll look for
525. 58:04commercials and you can either cut them out or skip them I usually mark them as skip which makes watching
526. 58:10the things I want to see that much better because they don't have commercials and then this also saves
527. 58:15me from getting subscriptions to other services like Hulu or Peacock this used to be running on a
528. 58:20bluetooth virtual machine then I moved it to Docker then it was running on windows now it's back on Docker
529. 58:27on a virtual machine but soon I'm going to move it over to my nas along with everything else for power
530. 58:33management I'm still using NUT Server now I use NUT Server to manage three of my ups so I have a Tripp
531. 58:40Lite UPS as you can see here I have my apc backup that's on the wall and then I have an Eaton UPS that's
532. 58:48in there too and this is this device here now it's really nice because it's hard to see this data
533. 58:54otherwise and the other nice thing about NUT Server is that you can coordinate shutdowns
534. 58:59now I used to do that but a couple of times it didn't work out so well so I've kind of eased back
535. 59:05and I disabled that feature of NUT Server but it's there if you need it say for instance you want to
536. 59:10shut down a machine safely when there's only 10% battery left you can totally do that but NUT Server is
537. 59:16a great way to look at your ups and see how it's doing at a glance I do wish there was something newer
538. 59:23than NUT Server and there kind of is there's this self-hosted service you could run called Peanut
539. 59:29and what it's doing is something I like which is giving a modern facelift to NUT Server itself and we
540. 59:36could see my different devices that I was just seeing in NUT Server you can switch between them and it will
541. 59:43plot out all of this data on this chart the one thing though is that none of this data persists so you'd have to keep this open for a really long time
542. 59:52and I hope in the future that some of this data gets persisted maybe to a database or something like that
543. 59:57so we can see all of this data over time because it's only good for right now like I said unless you
544. 1:00:04leave it open then you'll see it plotted but still this is a great start to making a more modern version of
545. 1:00:10NUT Server content management systems I think last year I had three so I was running Wordpress I was running Ghost blog
546. 1:00:19and I was also running wiki js now I'm down to one I wanted to get down to one and the way that I did
547. 1:00:27it was by shutting down two of the three so I did shut down my Wordpress blog because a lot of it was
548. 1:00:33redundant with what I'm doing now on my documentation so I shut that down and I was actually glad to shut
549. 1:00:38down Wordpress because it's kind of a nightmare to manage and then I shut down wiki.js we were using it in our
550. 1:00:45Discord server for a while but then they released version two and there was no upgrade path and I
551. 1:00:51think we all just kind of stopped using it so since it wasn't getting any use with our Discord server I
552. 1:00:57did retire that and so the last one that's up in my environment is Ghost blog and that's for my wife's
553. 1:01:04portfolio so only one cms system and it's Ghost blog which I think is the best out right now as far as static
554. 1:01:10site generators go I'm running two still so I'm running Jekyll and I'm running Hugo now they're
555. 1:01:16kind of the same they're both older tools but the idea behind a static site generator is that you write
556. 1:01:23markdown and then it will generate mark up for you so for instance with my documentation site all I need
557. 1:01:31to do is write these articles in markdown save them and then when it generates the markup you get nice
558. 1:01:38looking articles like this and they're great if you're not a designer or not really good at creating
559. 1:01:43uis because you can just focus on the content that you're writing and then the markdown generator the
560. 1:01:49markup generator will make it look nice for you and also I like managing even my documents as code so I write
561. 1:01:57this as code it runs CI CD against it it transpiles or generates the markup for me and then it puts it
562. 1:02:05in a container and then it puts it out in the public web actually in my Kubernetes cluster and then it's
563. 1:02:11out in the public web and then I do some stuff with globflare tell it to flush the cache but
564. 1:02:16again I have CI and CD for this too and I like doing it this way because it lets me manage my content as code
565. 1:02:23speaking of CI and CD I'm actually using two solutions right now so CI is continuous integration
566. 1:02:32and CD is continuous delivery so what does that mean really they're just concepts if you think about it
567. 1:02:38continuous integration basically says like hey we're gonna continuously integrate what you're working on
568. 1:02:45with the rest of what everyone else is working on so if you think of this like code it's like hey you work
569. 1:02:51on your own branch at some point you want to merge that branch into the main branch and that's when
570. 1:02:57your continuous integration would run and so you might run tests you might build containers you might
571. 1:03:02do anything you want to do but that's the continuous integration piece and then on the delivery side a lot
572. 1:03:09of people think of it like deployment it can be deployment but on that side you're delivering some
573. 1:03:14value now that could be an updated website some features it could be dropping off you know a zip
574. 1:03:20file somewhere it's really up to you and there really isn't a great definition for it at least as far as
575. 1:03:27what you deliver and so really it's just automating that entire process of building testing and delivering
576. 1:03:34some content or delivering software to someone else so I use two solutions for that I use GitHub and GitLab
577. 1:03:42and GitLab those are source control systems but with each they now have CI integration I mean GitLab's had it from the beginning
578. 1:03:49I'm getting and so GitLab has pipelines and runners so when I commit code at least specific code in my private GitLab
579. 1:03:57i have runners that will pick up that job and run the CI tasks and so those runners are hosted in my
580. 1:04:05Kubernetes cluster in my public cluster and each time I push up code to a private repo that I have it'll pull
581. 1:04:12it down run it build it deliver it deploy it whatever whatever it needs to do and that's all running in my
582. 1:04:19Kubernetes cluster in the co-location and then I also have GitHub runners for GitHub actions GitHub does it a
583. 1:04:25little bit different but have things called GitHub actions that run pipelines for you and so I created
584. 1:04:32runners that run here that actually run those actions and it sounds kind of complicated now I did that
585. 1:04:39specifically because I have a K3S playbook that helps you bootstrap and create a Kubernetes cluster
586. 1:04:46well I wanted a way to actually test the changes that people make so since it's open source people open up prs
587. 1:04:54against this repo and for a while I was testing all of this on my own personal Kubernetes cluster this
588. 1:05:02one two three four five here that I mentioned earlier and this is where I would pull down their
589. 1:05:07branch run their Ansible playbook and see if it passed and then merge in the PR if it did that got
590. 1:05:14really tedious really fast as you can imagine especially with more contributors so what I ended up doing was
591. 1:05:20creating my own GitHub action runners three of them and this will run the CI for those pull requests so if
592. 1:05:27someone makes a change to the K3S cluster Ansible playbook that I have this GitHub action runner will
593. 1:05:33pick it up it will actually create the full Kubernetes cluster all automated all in CI and run tests against
594. 1:05:41it and if they pass it will you know give a thumbs up or a green check mark on the CI for the pull request
595. 1:05:48and so that's something that took a long time and it took a lot of help from a lot of people
596. 1:05:53but it makes testing and accepting pull requests really easy because if it doesn't pass CI then
597. 1:06:00there's no reason to merge it in so but anyways I use two different CI and CD systems because I use both
598. 1:06:06GitLab and GitHub and then there's everything else like custom code I write to manage bots on Twitch, Twitter, and
599. 1:06:13Discord I'm running Longhorn on two Kubernetes cluster for my Kubernetes storage I'm running netboot xyz on my network
600. 1:06:22so that my clients can boot to network and install operating systems and that didn't fit into a category
601. 1:06:27and I'm even self-hosting some diagramming tools that you might have seen but I didn't know where those fit in
602. 1:06:34this has been another awesome year in self-hosting and I made a lot of changes going into 2025
603. 1:06:40and now throughout 2025 I'm going to make some of the biggest changes yet be sure you're subscribed so
604. 1:06:46you can see those updates I'm Tim [ASL] thanks for watching