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My Home Lab

This part of the website documents the current state of my homelab, mainly as reference to myself. It also includes research on various homelab-related things. The lab comprises a core network, which includes the main servers that need to be kept available at all times to prevent my house mates getting angry when the internet breaks, and to ensure that I can always access the internet for meetings, or other important work.

The rest of the lab is non-critical, meaning that I can break it for several months on end, and it shouldn't affect anyone else besides me, and should still hopefully allow me to continue my day-to-day work unaffected. All my servers are currently documented here.

Core Network

This comprises the following devices:

The core network is fault-tolerant to a failure of Virgin Media's network, although it currently requires me to manually connect my phone to the router via USB. See here for more details. The core network should also be simple and quick to get online (think within a day), and reliable to get running.

Semi-Permanent1 Services

These serivces support the rest of the homelab, and ideally shouldn't be switched off:

  • Network booting via TFTP and PXE. This is currently on a dedicated server, but the goal is to bring it into the router, so I have one less single point of failure in the network.
  • NAS. Technically, I can access the drives on the NAS via USB, but then I have to have my computer switched on and they aren't available to the other users.

Retired Services

  • IPv6 tunnel with Hurricane Electric. I ran this service and provided a separate SSID which ran a 6in4 tunnel on the OpenWRT router. Due to some traffic shaping or hardware decoding on the Virgin Media Super Hub 2, my line speed was severely throttled from ~250Mbps to ~15Mbps, and short of further tunnelling via Wireguard or UDP, this wasn't acceptable.

  1. Yes this is a word, in my head it means that I could change it up but it's quite annoying to do so and would make my life more difficult than it should be. ↩

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