My homelab consists of almost exclusively Raspberry Pis. You might be thinking it can’t be much of a homelab with just RPIs but I’m hoping to surprise you. I love RPIs because they are extremely power efficient and good value for money.
Raspberry Pi Cake Router #
Traffic shaping is a premium router feature, usually limited to “prosumer” and business routers. The reality is that most traffic shaping is not actually that great. A simple aria2 download or a torrent will saturate both PFSense and Ubiquiti based routers, which at best use fq_codel Smart Queue Management (SQM). Unless they cap each client to a max bandwidth, they won’t be able to balance multiple users properly. The crème de la crème of traffic shaping is the appropriately named Cake which can peer into the NAT table and effectively load balance an unrestricted torrent client while keeping the ping of other clients intact. Cake is built in to modern Linux kernels and unsurprisingly goes great with Raspberries. OpenWRT supports Cake, but it’s relatively simple to setup a Raspberry Pi as a router from scratch if you already have a managed switch. I am looking forward to writing an article about provisioning a router Pi with all the features and advantages.
Raspberry Pi Kubernetes Cluster #
The good folks at Raspbernetes inspired me. This blog is actually served on a Kubernetes cluster, with an image built by a CI running in the cluster, with code committed to a git repo on the cluster.
- Apps:
- authelia - SSO server
- radicale - Cal,CardDav server
- gitlab - Git + Everything possibly related
- home-assistant - Home Automation
- docker-mailserver - Postfix + Dovecot + Friends for selfhosted email
- flood - Pretty and mobile friendly torrent frontend
- omada-controller - TP-Link Omada Network Controller
- doods - Visual human and object recognition
- openspeedtest - Speed Test testing max local and external speeds
- my blog - built using GitLab Runners and Buildkitd
- harbor - Docker Registry UI
- thelounge - IRC client
- ngircd - IRC Server
- znc - IRC bouncer
- System:
- flux2 - Keep cluster in sync with this repo
- ingress-nginx - Ingress controller
- cert-manager - Automated letsencrypt broker
- calico - My CNI of choice which supports BGP peering
- kube-prometheus - Prometheus and friends
- buildkitd - Super efficient container build daemon
- synology-csi - Synology official CSI driver
- k10-kasten
You can see my full GitOps-y manifests I use to provision them here: https://github.com/Vaskozl/home-infra.
Network - managed by raspberries #
My network is composed of Omada access points and POE switch. In theory the access points could be Raspis but that would be a waste of processing power and Raspi isn’t designed with peak WiFi performance in mind. The network is however managed by the Omada controller running on the Raspberry Pi cluster!The Raspberry Pi cluster helps coordinate the access points to navigate clients towards a path and roam across the APs with 802.11k/v for extra smooth roaming.
What’s Next #
Currently I have Reolink cameras because they are cheap and great, but in theory one could create Raspi cameras and sensors. Object (including human) detection is of course performed by the Raspis, and notifications are sent out by them through Home Assistant.That’s all for now - but I’ll make sure to update this article with new additions and links to how-tos as I write them.
