Going Overboard with My Homelab

I'm a father and husband, a software developer, a computer geek, a board game collector, and a heart transplant recipient living in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
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I'm a father and husband, a software developer, a computer geek, a board game collector, and a heart transplant recipient living in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
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A series of posts about my over-engineered homelab and why I made the choices I made.
tldr: I started with a modest NAS setup in my homelab, but my curiosity led me to build an 8-node Ceph distributed storage cluster. Ceph, though overkill for a home environment, offers scalable, resilient storage by distributing data across multiple ...
If you use TrendWeight with a Fitbit account, there's a change coming that you should know about. tldr: Google is retiring the API that TrendWeight uses to read weight data from Fitbit, and once it's

Well, it’s been just shy of a week since the launch of the new version of TrendWeight. Early feedback was mostly positive and many small bugs were squashed in the first few days. There were also a couple larger improvements that just went live that a...

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With AI in the Co-Pilot Seat

Last night at the gaming table… They ascended cautiously, weapons ready. In a chamber on the upper floor, they found her - an emaciated figure kneeling within a circle of power. On either side stood skeletal guardians, each bearing six arms laden wi...

// Ewal
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I'm a father and husband, a software developer, and a general geek. I ramble about web development, ai, homelabs, and smart home tech.
More about me.
My homelab is certainly more elaborate than necessary, but that's because I love to tinker. It's one of my hobbies, and truth be told, my lab's main purpose is just that—being a hobby. While some components are genuinely useful, the overall setup is delightfully over the top.
The main parts of the lab are:
A 3-node Proxmox cluster that runs VMs
An 8-node Ceph cluster that provides primary storage
Two separate NAS appliances that serve as backup targets (one of which I plan to move off-site)
A Ubiquiti network with an OPNsense firewall/router and a Tailscale overlay network connecting most servers
A Unifi Protect security camera system combined with Scrypted in a VM to make cameras available to Apple HomeKit
Home Assistant in a VM
A VM dedicated to Generative AI tinkering
Many containerized applications in a 3-node Docker Swarm cluster
This is the start of a series of posts where I will dig into the details a few of these and give some perspective on why I ended up with the current state. In the meantime, here is a general overview diagram of what things look like as of May 2024:
