Homelab overhaul! Part one

This post will be the first in a series of posts where i overhaul my homelab setup.
Stumbling over a mini-PC at a decent price i found out it was finally time to do the overhaul.

My current setup consists of an older laptop which acts as my NAS, and a few raspberry Pi's. All set up in a kubernetes cluster(k3s), with a single master node. This is FAR from ideal, but it is the result of "learning by doing". So it will be great to tear it all down and rebuild it.

In my current cluster i am hosting Openhab for smarthome, Pihole for DNS, Plex or media, this ghost blog, some databases for my Gnucash and some home made python programs!

The first step of the overhaul is to install more ram and a 1TB SSD to the new machine for it to act as a NAS as well. And install Proxmox hypervisor. I will be using Proxmox LXC containers to run separate instances of:

• Pihole, outside of my k3s cluster this time
• A simple NAS with NFS (maybe samba)
• A k3s master node
• Unknown instances of k3s worker nodes
• Open-WRT with VPN connection.

After some tinkering in the BIOS, i got to install Proxmox on my new hardware. And this is my first time testing Proxmox! The install went smooth as butter. And i could quickly set up my first LXC container. The lucky first one was my NAS to be, as a base templete i chose the Rocky Linux 8 one. And i set up a shared folder from the NVMe drive and shared it with NFS. I am still awaiting my SSD to use for the NAS as well.

I was debating back and forth with using TrueNAS or Openmediavault, but i ended on just using a simple NFS server as that will fulfill all my needs.

I also created myself a template based on Rocky Linux 8 where i have done some prerequisites for running k3s. And using that template i quickly spun up 6 containers which i turned in to a k3s HA cluster with 3 master nodes and 3 worker nodes.

Finally i set up my new and fresh Pihole instance and started with just setting my TV's DNS to it. And boy does it block a lot! But before I send all my traffic that way, i need to do some fixes to my network. I will create a new VLAN for all my homelab devices firstly. And i am also getting a new Ubiquity switch with PoE+ so i can finally utilize the PoE+ hats for the Pi's that i bought.

Stay tuned for more updates on my homelab in the near future!