As shown in one of my last posts, I operate a number of devices and services at home. Until now, these had been distributed across my home, wherever there was power and network available. This was not a very pleasant situation. This, I decided to build a shelf for these (and future) devices.

As shown in my last post, I run a number of Docker containers. For most of these, I let Docker create a default network. However, by default Docker is rather wasteful with its address space, leading to conflicts in my networks. Once identified, resolving this is straightforward though.

I have been getting multiple requests recently to give an overview over my homelab. I will do this in this article. I will include some of the history, but ignore many of the experiments I tried and failed over the years (Banana Pi, RPi-based GlusterFS, easily scalable Kubernetes on RPis, Docker on ARMv6, etc.).

I run a small number of webservices at home behind a Traefik & Authelia setup. Authelia is used for authorization, as well as authentication through a connected LDAP server. In this setup, I find myself frequently using similar patterns again and again that took some time to figure out, so I document them here. Note that none of these are my invention, but I did find them hard to come by, so I want to summarize them here. Maybe they will help someone else, or myself, in future.

Recently, I visited Singapore and managed to pick up a Brother P-Touch PT-2430PC for a relatively cheap 40 SGD. I always wanted a label writer, but didn’t want to deal with pressing little buttons and working with a tiny screen. However, having to set it up, working through some Word-like software just for printing a label also didn’t really thrill me. I rather want to be able to quickly print something from my phone. Thus, I assembled a bit of open software and added some on my own to make this happen: Labeler, a web interface for Brother P-Touch.

As everyone knows, I am a huge fan of Linux for many applications. I have a number of Linux-based servers running, I have been using different Linux dervates for work and privately in virtual machines, but until recently, I did not have a desktop system with Linux. I have been missing that every once in a while. Some things, such as network administration and software development are just so much easier on Linux. I did not want to spend much money on an additional machine though, especially since my daily driver will remain on Windows, for family reasons. I thus settled on a netbook. Yes, one of these small screen devices popular in the early 2000s. I figured that it should offer sufficient performance for my use cases, while remaining portable and cheap. Of course, I went with an Arch Linux installation.