Public Lab

Welcome on my official public repository where I commit my different work on all the techno I can touch. It is mainly use in my homelab for testing, but you can also find some production things, still applicable in my homelab.
This is more a kind of journal of my tech watch and my experimentations than an open source project. You are of course welcome to fork it and do whatever you want with it but don't ask for PR as it is not a collaborative project.

As this repo is my journal, it will evolve with me and the structure and content might change a lot in the upcoming months/years.

Introduction

This repo is home of most of my personal experimentations around IT subjects I want to learn, test along my technology watch.
Here you will find some Infrastructure as Code (Ansible & OpenTofu), Kubernetes stuff (a lot), GitOps, Docker & Podman, CI/CD, Networking, Virtualization etc...
I know that's a lot, but when you are building, maintaining, fixing, improving a whole IT infrastructure from scratch to production, you have to touch a wide range of topics and master them at some point.

Hardware & Low Level Infrastructure

My lab consists of hybrid set of on prem and cloud resources.
On premise :

• Sophos XGS 3300 as firewall appliance & L3 router
• Aruba 2920 24 ports switch
• HPE Proliant DL360 Gen 11 as main compute unit
• HPE Proliant DL180 Gen 9 as SAN
• Lenovo x3550M5 as one production RKE2 master node

On cloud :

• VPS as production K3S master node

For the moment my whole infrastructure rest on a virtualization layer. On premise I use Proxmox as hypervisor and manage it through IaC (Packer OpenTofu Ansible).
All production VMs are running on Rocky 9 or OpenSuse Leap 15. In order to improve the security and performances, I'm slowly migrating the container workload to Alpine hosts or lightweight immutable OSes like OpenSuse Leap Micro.

Hosted Apps & Tools

Public facing apps

Logo	Name	Description	Host	Host Type
	Ghost	Blazing fast blog engine	Proxmox Home	Docker
	Forgejo	Git repo, fork of Gitea	Proxmox Home	Docker
	Linkding	Lightweight bookmark manager	VPS	K3S
	Rallly	Lightweight Doodle like app	VPS	K3S

Personal apps

Logo	Name	Description	Host	Host Type
	Plex server	Local streaming service	Proxmox Home	VM
	*arr stack	Linux ISOs torrent management stack	Proxmox Home	Docker
	MeTube	Web interface for YT-DLP	Proxmox Home	Docker
	Unifi controller	Web management console for my Unifi AP	Proxmox Home	VM
	PiHole	DNS relay & add blocker	Proxmox Home	VM
	Paperless NGX	Documents management	Proxmox Home	Docker

Kubernetes

As a DevOps engineer, it is my duty to constantly learn and master Kubernetes. So even if I do not need it particularly, I have a single node K3S.
This is a simple setup and yet controlled through GitOps. From Git repo to deployments everything is self hosted.

• CD by Flux
• Update watch by Renovate

Whenever Renovate finds a tag to update in the manifests, it creates a PR then after I merge it Flux by reconciliating the cluster state to the manifests will roll out the updated containers in new pods automatically.

Networking

Network engineering always was my main weakness, but with my infrastructure growing and becoming more complex with time, I had to improve my network and learn how to properly set it up.
First improvement was to use VLAN and design a proper network infrastructure to support production and public hosting without compromising my LAN area.
In order to learn advanced I wanted to do a 3 layers network but as it is costly in terms of hardware and especially in configuration/maintainance hours I limited the network to 2 layers and all the L3 routing is done at router/firewall level (I wouldn't gain much performance by doing it at switch level compared to the config time I would spend).
[WIP network schema to come]

Storage

Storage is handled by TrueNAS on the DL180 G9 hardware. It was originally on Core and updated to Scale recently. Data is shared through iSCSI, SMB and NFS shares.

DIY