I saw someone else do a write-up of their homelab so I thought I’d do a short one of mine.
Hardware
It’s pretty basic. When I rebuilt my workstation I took the old machine, gave away the graphics card to a friend, and installed ubuntu server on it. It has a i7-8700 on it and 64GB of ram and sits in a closet just below my router (a Unifi Dream Router 7, to be honest I didn’t think home routers could be so good). That router also can serve as a VPN so I can be on my LAN while not at home.
Hestia
I wanted some way to host a blog and originally set up hestia to orchestrate the whole thing. It’s a bit overkill for what I need (I don’t use DNS or Mail or lots of the other cool things, and I’m the only real user), but it works pretty well. From there, I manage 3 domains that point to different services.
- wilsoniumite.com – This blog, a wordpress site
- photos.wilsoniumite.com – Immich
- wordlestat.wilsoniumite.com – A wordle bot
This blog
I wrote my first ever post on medium, but I realized it would be way more fun to host it myself so I quickly set this up. I took a standard theme and cut out a lot of the flab so this page would look a lot simpler. I’m pretty happy with the result but sometimes do feel like wrestling with wordpress is a pain.
Immich
That other homelab post mentioned Immich and it seemed like such a good idea. I was already annoyed that google constantly complained I was using too much storage for my photos, and honestly I didn’t want to trust them with it anyways. Immich is great, I just need the app on my phone and it works exactly like google photos except way more fun and I get a terabyte of storage (or a bit less, my NVMe is 1TB).
wordlestat
I made a discord bot that is now used by a few dozen guilds to create leaderboards for wordle results. I wrote about it here. When people interact with the bot discord forwards that request to my endpoint and the Node server handles it.
Signoz
The wordle bot had some teething issues and I wanted to be able to observe usage in more detail, so there is an unexposed signoz instance that gathers logs from that, as well as general metrics from the server like cpu and ram usage. It’s been really useful in tracking the usage of the bot, here’s an example of the dashboard:
Restic & Hetzner
I realised it would be very sad to lose this blog, the wordle bot, and my image library, so I finally set up an off-site backup of everything. For just a few euros a month I copy it all over to a datacenter in Finland. Worth it for the peace of mind. With that said, I should probably be using backrest rather than setting all this up manually.
What kind of traffic do I get to my blog?
I thought I’d add a little addendum with some analysis of the log files for wilsoniumite.com. I’ve done my best to filter out bots properly, but I think a lot of them still snuck through. Here’s the breakdown (from a month where none of my posts have been popular anywhere):
