Home Lab

We’re going to leverage Docker, Cloudflare DNS, and Caddy to set up a reverse proxy for our home-lab, which is both easy to configure, and automatically handles SSL certs for us. Previously, I used Nginx Proxy Manager, but I’ve grown to not love this application, as its both difficult to have your configurations live in code, as well to have SSL certifications both be made, and renewed automatically. Additionally, I previously used Namecheap DNS, as my domains are registered there, but I have found their API to be less then desirable....

My girlfriend is a large animal veterinarian and has to park her vet truck at home. Her truck comes equipped with a “vet box” which provides climate control for her equipment. To ensure the vet box does not drain the truck’s battery, we must plug it in whenever its parked. We live at an older apartment and have found ourselves discovering the vet box’s outlet having been abruptly turned off. This requires either a fuse to be reset or the reset button on the outlet itself to be pressed....

When running a home server and or NAS, one thing that should be on your mind is How can I protect my hardware? Generally, the most expensive part of a NAS or home server are all the high capacity hard drives. A single power surge could potentially wipe out all the hardware in your NAS / home server, and power outages may cause harm to your hard drives. Which brings me to a piece of hardware that no home server or NAS should be without, introducing an “uninterruptible power supply” (UPS)....

One of the things I always do when starting a new hobby is lookup as many opinions on gear needed and mull it over for a long time before pulling the trigger. Something I really liked about unRAID was its willingness to accept hard drives and SSDs from different manufactures, of different sizes and speeds. This means you can start with whatever hardware you might have lying around. Have an old 500 GB hard drive?...

When trying to play games over Zerotier or using it to test some development code, sometimes you can get stuck in the status REQUESTING_CONFIGURATION What has worked before is Manually remove the problem person from the Zerotier Network Note this bans them To unban them, manually readd them by their Node ID Then the problem person can go to services.msc and scroll all the way to the bottom and restart the zero tier service This doesn’t always help… if all else fails, restart the problem computer after doing these steps

This post heavily relies on this guide by Spxlabs and I am simply documenting my changes. Benefits By leveraging a second computer to perform OBS encoding, one can reduce their CPU usage on their main computer anywhere from 10-25%. Additionally, one does not need to purchase a capture card! Prerequisites Before you beginning following the Spxlabs guide you should have completed the following: Have Unraid installed Have Community Applications installed on your Unraid box Enable Docker Hub searches for Community Apps Have a Twitch account Install OBS on your gaming PC Install the NDI plugin on your gaming PC....

Creating Backups There’s a lovely Unraid application called “CA Backup / Restore Appdata” which will allow one to automate the backing up of: our Unraid USB stick: Where the Unraid OS is stored, as well as some operating system settings libvirt.img: Where information about our VMs is stored Appdata: Where a lot of our Docker containers save their images and settings I leverage this tool to setup weekly backups of the folders described above, but we’re not done yet, as this stores the backups on the Unraid array itself....

At the time of writing this I have 54 Docker containers running on my home lab Unraid server. I find myself accessing the services I’m running from many machines and quickly realized how impossible it is to memorize not only the IP address I assigned the server the all the ports each service is running on. My goal was to have an easy way to remember string map to each port....

If you’re anything like me you have a few old laptops and desktops lying around the house from past builds. Historically I have tried to build a home lab by rigging together a series of seven raspberry pis. The novelty of this quickly wore off and I was unimpressed with the performance and slightly higher difficulty to manage so many machines. Just as I was going to give up on the idea of having my very own home lab, a friend at work introduced me to unRAID....

An SSH key is an alternative way to authenticate. Instead of manually typing in a password you have memorized, you may provide a file known as your “private key”. This private key can be thought of like the key to a lock, much like the password to a regular login. In general it is advised to have one key per machine, which makes them easier to roll. Additionally, I’d suggest using ssh config to make things easier, this is a great link....