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Home Server

This repository is a collection of tooling, docs and configuration that defines my homelab and specific purpose nodes. Currently this boils down to:

  • homeserver cluster, serving general-purpose applications
  • homeserver-backup cluster, keeping backups from the above
  • printserver, which enables wireless access to a USB-only printer

Overview

Overview

Key takeaways:

  • ingress-nginx on entry, with cert-manager + Let's Encrypt (DNS based challenges in Route53) backed SSL, oauth2-proxy for non-OIDC-native services
  • vault for centralized identity and secrets management
  • longhorn used for storage with daily backups of "important" volumes in a separate cluster

Networking

Clusters live in a separate cluster VLAN defined in a network_layout repository. Mentioned repo also defines the VPN setup and IPs assignment.

All traffic to *.<DOMAIN> and *.backup.<DOMAIN> is redirected to specific cluster LBs on a router/VPN level.

Hardware

homeserver

Three Dell Optiplex nodes, totaling 18 cores, 192G of RAM and 6T of storage (1x2T NVMe on each node).

Nodes mounted in a 10″ rack using the 3d printed frames with minor modifications (TODO: upstream model changes).

homeserver backup

Three RPis 4B, totaling 12 cores, 24G of RAM and 3T of storage (1x1T M.2 SATA attached over USB on each node).

Pis are mounted in a 10″ rack using the 3d printed frames. Power is provided via official PoE+ hats.

printserver

RPi Zero 2 W, with OTG splitter for a USB-A type port.

Bootstrapping

Initial steps

In other words, what needs to be done when you lay your hands on a new machine. As a rule of thumb this only has to be done once.

RPi nodes

  1. Update the bootloader and make it boot from the USB first. RPi Imager > Bootloader > USB Boot
  2. Flash the official Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) image and make sure that it works fine. You can use this step to run raspi-config and set WLAN country

Dell Optiplex

  1. Run extended diagnostic suite
  2. Update BIOS
  3. Run extended diagnostic suite again

Installing OS

We want to use a bootstrap image that is ready to be provisioned with ansible without requiring any user interaction first. To achieve it, we need to:

  1. create bootstrap user ansible_bootstrap with passwordless sudo privileges
  2. provide public SSH key to be added to authorized_keys
  3. setup minimal required SSH hardening (deny password authentication, deny root login, only allow public key based logins)

Scripts are provided to prepare such image

Building OS image

Currently Raspbian is used for RPi nodes (because of the OOTB support for PoE+ hat fans), while Dell nodes use Debian.

Take a look at corresponding build_ scripts in image_build directory for more details. Few useful variables:

  1. HOST_SSH_PUB_KEYS_FILE points to a pubkey that should be added to authorized_keys on the target
  2. LUKS_PASSWORD (build_debian specific) if provided, will be used for full disk encryption. Defaults to obtaining the password from password manager

Required packages on host for the build to succeed:

  • vagrant (builds are performed in VMs for better interoperability)
  • ssh

Built images can be found in image_build/output directory.

If you were to use an official image you would have to perform the user, SSH and (optionally) LUKS setup manually.

In later steps Ansible will make sure that SSH config is properly hardened and ansible_bootstrap user is removed.

Creating boot media

RPi

When you have the image on hand you can flash it to the drive using the tool of your choice, e.g. with dd

# dd if=<path to the image> of=<path to your SSD> bs=64k oflag=dsync status=progress

or using a tool like rufus or etcher.

Dell

Create a bootable USB drive or upload the file to a TFTP server to perform netboot. Afterwards, install the system as usual. Beware, you have to use the Install (not graphical) option for the preseed file to be taken into account.

The preseed file responsible for the initial setup is burned into the image itself.

Ansible

This part is responsible for most of the software provisioning.

The idea is to ensure that core blocks are in place, for example:

  1. users
  2. firewall
  3. access restriction, e.g. via SSH
  4. required dependencies
  5. container runtime

This step also removes the ansible_bootstrap user and initializes Kubernetes clusters.

To provision the nodes:

  1. Enter the ansible directory
  2. Set up the workspace with poetry install
  3. Get dependencies via poetry run ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml
  4. Run the poetry run ansible-playbook site.yml

Take a look at inventory.yml and site.yml for supported options. Most notably passwords that will be set for the newly created users are obtained from the password manager by default.

Core cluster setup (homeserver/homeserver_backup)

At the very beginning obtain kubeconfig via scp server@<node>:/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml kubeconfig.yaml. You will have to modify the server field in the kubeconfig so it points to a remote node and not 127.0.0.1 (which is the default).

It's assumed that homeserver and homeserver_backup have corresponding contexts created under the names homeserver and homeserver-backup respectively

Required tools:

  • kubectl
  • helm
  • helmfile
  • terragrunt
  • terraform

Few important charts that will be deployed in this step:

  1. cert-manager for certificates generation (Route53 DNS solver under the hood)
  2. ingress-nginx for reverse proxying
  3. victoria-metrics-k8s-stack for monitoring, configured with PagerDuty and Dead Man's Snitch
  4. vault for secrets and identity management
  5. oauth2-proxy for OIDC support for applications that do not support it natively
  6. longhorn for distributed storage

Cluster deployment

All the cluster related configuration is stored under helmfile directory. Different directories are to be used depending on the cluster. Below instructions define how to perform a full (from scratch) deployment

homeserver

  1. cd to helmfile/core
  2. run DOMAIN=<your domain> helmfile sync
  3. cd to helmfile/vault-terraform
  4. run terragrunt apply
  5. cd to helmfile/services
  6. run DOMAIN=<your domain> helmfile sync

While the steps above cover the deployment, there's some special treatment needed to initialize vault from scratch. Please follow the helmfile/vault-terraform/vault-setup.md. Make sure that you have provided the required values for helmfile/vault-terraform/terraform.tfvars.

homeserver_backup

This cluster largely depends on the homeserver setup, e.g. for auth. Make sure that the above cluster is deployed and ready first

  1. cd to helmfile/backup
  2. run DOMAIN=<your domain> helmfile sync

Notes

printserver

Currently the ansible playbook takes care of:

  1. setting up the CUPS server
  2. installing (properiatary) drivers for HP LaserJet Pro P1102 printer

It requires the printer to be connected to the device when the playbook is being applied.