This is a personal blog focused on computer software and hardware. Most projects are implementing software and hardware for a homelab. What is a homelab? I would say a homelab could be a single computer or dozens of computers connected in a network. You can also integrate with computers in the Cloud.
When it comes to running containers, docker is the most widely used tool with millions of container images available on the public docker hub. If you are not familiar with docker, check out a previous post to get an introduction. I am looking at Alternatives since docker is no longer used as a container runtime in the kubernetes platform. I use kubernetes in my homelab to orchestrate container based services accross multiple computers.
nginx_logo I will be using nginx to serve as a reverse proxy for my network. With Nginx, I can manage my proxy configurations in a single server. Nginx is one of the most widely used web servers and can also function as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache. Nginx is free and open-source software. Linux example On Linux distributions, nginx should be available in the software repositories.
updated: 2024-02-01 Once you have a kubernetes environment running, a tool like argoCD can help you manage applications that you want to deploy on kubernetes. ArgoCD expects a pattern of using git repositories as the source of truth for defining the state of your applications. You can communicate with the kubernetes API by submitting requests in YAML or JSON format. I am going to be focusing on managing applications with helm charts.
updated: 2024-06-11 Kubernetes, also known as k8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and managment of containerized applications. For more of an overview, take a look at a previous post getting started with a simple kubernetes environment. This post is looking at a tool to deploy a kubernetes cluster with multiple nodes and most importantly it can be used on physical computers, a virtual machine, or a cloud based virtual server.
My homelab has evolved quite a bit over time. After implementing a wiki, I have tracked servers and services deployed there. This blog will serve as a nice location to periodically record the state of the homelab. The lab all started in 2016. After the first hardware failure (a z270 asus motherboard), the lab shrunk to one raspberry pi. 2016 homelab_2016 In 2018 I acquired some Dell Poweredge R510 servers. One of the mainboards died when I attempted to change the CPUs.
Grafana Loki was introduced in a previous post. If you do not have grafana and loki, check out that post to get started. Today we will set up a grafana dashboard to explore log files that are collected by Loki. As mentioned in the previous post, logs are sent to grafana loki using an agent called promtail. This agent can securely forward logs over HTTPS so all log messages will be encrypted in transit.