Homelab on ImDevinC

Making my home automation setup family friendly

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Home automation is great… for tech people

Like a lot of people recently, I’ve been diving into different pieces of home automation for my house. I see lots of really cool YouTube videos from people who post their very elaborate setups with tons of really cool features and that do insane things. I would like to get to that point eventually, where walking between rooms toggles lights, my blinds adjust based on my activities throughout the day, and who knows what else. One major piece that I feel is missing from these setups is making sure that the automations are friendly not only for the family living in the house (a lot of people do think about this), but also for when people come to visit our watch the house and we aren’t home. That’s what I need to solve for.

Securing my homelab

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 04:35:53 +0000

Introduction

Awhile ago I setup my homelab running on a kubernetes server sitting in my office. You can read about it in my other blog post here: Migrating my homelab. One thing that security focused people will probably immediately notice, is that I have public facing services but no mention of a firewall or security product. Luckily, I have yet to have anything negative happen, but that doesn’t mean people haven’t tried. If I occasionally look at my access logs, I can see quite a few random IP’s hitting my endpoints looking for something. I stumbled upon a reddit post in /r/homelab where someone was using Crowdsec, and that’s what prompted me to start digging in.

Migrating my homelab

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:43:38 +0000

Note, this will be a very high level overview of how I got my cluster and services running. If you would like more detail of how I did this, please let me know and I can break these down in a separate post in the future

Introduction

A few years ago, I setup Proxmox on my homelab server to manage multiple VM’s and configurations. Since then, I realized that I wasn’t really using the VM’s anymore other than running one VM that housed all my docker services and one containerized version of HomeAssistant. In my main VM that housed all my docker services, I ran Portainer to help maintain my services and keep things a bit more organized. This worked wel labout 90% of the time, but I ran into a few issues that were annoying: