State of the homelab, 2024

November 19, 2024

Within a couple of days of closing on our house, I hired a local company to install ethernet throughout. I went a little overboard: four ports in all of the main rooms; four outside; and a few others scattered around inside—27 in all.

I went with TP-Link’s Omada line for network hardware and software. There’s a router, controller, switch, and three Wi-Fi access points. I’m not a professional network administrator and I was able to configure it mostly how I want it without much trouble, thanks to some helpful YouTube videos.

I set up a pretty big internal subnet, 192.168.10.1/23, which allows addresses for up to 510 clients. Again, I went overboard. At the time of this writing, there are 23 clients connected (wired and wireless). DHCP starts at x.x.10.64 and I’m manually assigning IPs below that.

The most interesting parts of the network are three devices: “bardeen”, “pavel” and “lee” (I name my devices after Nobel-winning physicists¹).

Bardeen is a Raspberry Pi 3 in the attic. It’s got a 1090 MHz antenna and receives ADS-B signals from aircraft as far as 200 miles away. It feeds that data to FlightAware and Flightradar24.

Pavel is a Raspberry Pi 4. It lives in the network closet and runs Pi-Hole.

And last but not least: Lee. This is a “renewed” Lenovo M-series one-liter PC. It’s powered by an Intel Core i5-8500T, has 16 GB of RAM and cost under $200.

I’m running Grafana, Prometheus, Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Pinchflat, Paperless-ngx, and a local copy of my blog for development and testing. Nearly everything is running via Docker, which I’m learning more about, all atop Debian Bookworm.

I’ve also setup Tailscale so I can access the network from outside my house.

Some ideas for the future include: - Getting one or two PoE cameras and running an NVR - Doing more monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana - More advanced network config, like creating multiple VLANs to isolate IoT devices