Homelab

⚠️ WORK IN PROGRESS

Hardware

• 4 nodes of NEC SFF PC PC-MK26ECZDR (Japanese version of the ThinkCentre M700)
  • CPU: Intel Core i5-6600T
  • RAM: 16GB
  • SSD: 128GB
• TP-Link TL-SG108 switch

Technology stack

Ansible	Cloudflare	Docker	Fedora	Gitea	Helm
Kubernetes	Prometheus	Rancher	Terraform	Vault	Wireguard

Architecture

Quick explanation

• Enter the tools container, which contains all the neccessary tools (see building instruction bellow)
• Run make
  • Ansible will render the configuration file for each bare metal machine (like IP, hostname...) and the PXE server from templates
  • The tools container will create sibling containers to build a PXE server (includes DHCP, TFTP and HTTP server)
  • Ansible will wake the machines up using Wake on LAN
  • The machine start the boot process:
    • BIOS boot in network mode and look for DHCP server
    • DHCP server point it to the TFTP server to get boot files and boot config
    • The boot config contains parameter to get automated OS installation config file
    • The OS get installed and the machine reboots to the new operating system
  • Terraform will create a Kubernetes cluster
  • ArgoCD will install the applications

Layers

Layer	Name	Description	Provisioner
0	metal	Bare metal OS installation, Terraform state backend,...	Ansible, PXE server
1	infra	Kubernetes clusters	Terraform, Helm
2	apps	Gitea, Vault and more in the future	Argo

Usage

Prerequisite

For the controller (to run Ansible, stateless PXE server, Terraform...):

• SSH keys in ~/.ssh/{id_ed25519,id_ed25519.pub} (you can generate it with ssh-keygen -t ed25519)
• Docker with host networking driver (which means only Docker on Linux hosts, you can use a Linux virtual machine with bridged networking if you're on macOS or Windows)

For bare metal nodes:

• PXE IPv4 enabled
• Wake-on-LAN enabled
• Secure boot disabled (optional, depending on the OS)

Configurations

• Bare metal nodes settings (IP, MAC...)
• OS settings (PXE, network...)

Building

Open the tools container:

make tools

Then build the homelab:

make