Homelab

I run a modest homelab mostly powered by Raspberry Pis and Ubiquiti Unifi networking equipment.

• 4 x Raspberry Pis (1 for Home Assistant, 3 for Kubernetes)
• 1 x Topton N100 SBC
• Unifi Dream Machine Pro SE
• Unifi USW Pro Max 16
• 3 x U6 Pro
• Unifi Flex Mini

Home Assistant

Technically, Home Assistant is a production application. I certainly get the wife asking what’s happened when its down.

My Home Assistant set up is primarily used to act as a common layer on-top of Shelly relays and Philips Hue lightbulbs. It also integrates well with UniFi Protect cameras.

Shelly Relays

I’m running a number of different Shelly models behind light switches.

• Shelly Dimmer 2
• Shelly Plus 2PM
• Shelly Plus 1PM
• Shelly 1 Mini Gen3

The key requirement was for them to be completely airgapped (something I don’t actually do out of laziness). I have a preference for in-switch relays rather than smart lightbulbs as the relays tend to be cheaper. All the downstairs rooms have 4+ spotlights which adds up!

A few important notes:

• Set the switches to toggle mode. The issue with the relay matching the state of the switch is activating it remotely means you then have to rock the switch to change the state. It ended up confusing where you could toggle the physical switch and nothing would happen.
• Make sure you assign a static IP. Unifi makes this simple with a setting, so I don’t have to disable DHCP.
• Don’t forget to disable the Wifi Access Point. By default there isn’t a password and its an easy backdoor into your network.

Philips Hue

We’ve adding Philips Hue lightbulbs to the living room and bedroom lamps. They make the living room cosy and are useful for being remote controlled in the bedroom.

I haven’t found any use for them in the guest rooms. Guests don’t have access to the Hue app or Home Assistant, so they don’t have the benefits from control and if guests turn the lamb off via the switch, they can no longer be controlled.

Unifi Networking

I settled on Unifi network gear as a middle ground between mainstream consumer networking equipment and full DIY OpenWrt or similar. They also have a solid line up of cameras. A few requirements needed to be met:

• Support for VLANs. Nothing super fancy, mainly segregation between IoT, guest, and homelab equipment.
• Simple management. The Unifi Console allows remote management, which has been useful during the rare occasion that we’ve had a network issue and I’ve been away from home.
• PoE. Using low-voltage PoE to power access points and cameras is significantly easier than having to run 240v cable or rely on batteries.

The subscription free cameras was also a major selling point. Unifi UDM SE can record 24/7 until the disk fills up. An equivalent plan from Google would cost ~£160 a year.

The biggest surprise feature was Teleport VPN. It is trivial to set up and is great for remotely accessing the internal network. Very useful for watching UK streams from abroad!

Kubernetes Cluster

TBD

TrueNAS

TrueNAS is the latest addition to the homelab. Like Home Assistant, this is a production service, however it isn’t “wife-facing” so the impact of downtime is limited. All storage is sync’d to S3-compatible storage, so despite the drives being 10-years old and having sector faults, I’m not overly concerned about data loss. Currently, its only storing local copies of content stored on cloud providers or video game clips.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is my domain registrar, DNS provider, and tunneller for internal applications.

Its widely supported by dynamic DNS tools, which is useful when home IP addresses can often rotate, and ACME clients using the DNS-01 challenge. Cloudflare also maintains a Terraform module for configuring DNS records.

Cloudflare is also used to host this website.