Homelabs

A homelab is a laboratory at home: self-hosting, experimenting with new technologies, practicing for certifications (khuedoan’s definition, matching the r/homelab introduction and the Home Operations Discord, ex-k8s-at-home). What makes the genre interesting is that it reuses production discipline on hardware that would otherwise be e-waste — the lab is where ops people rehearse the practices their employers are too conservative to try.

The published reference repos are themselves the genre’s artifacts, worth reading as blueprints:

• khuedoan/homelab (9.6k★, GPL-3.0) — “fully automated homelab from empty disk to running services with a single command”: PXE-boot bare-metal provisioning, automated Kubernetes install, GitOps app management, on 4× NEC SFF i5-6600T nodes. The canonical demonstration that the whole lifecycle — boot, cluster, workloads — can be one declarative pipeline.
• theepicsaxguy/homelab (221★, MIT, HCL) — “Over-Engineered GitOps Homelab”: Proxmox + Talos Linux + OpenTofu + Argo CD, Cilium, Longhorn, External Secrets from Bitwarden, Authentik SSO, cert-manager, Gateway API, CloudNativePG, Kubechecks pre-rollout validation, Cloudflare tunnels. A Dell Precision Tower 7810 + a Supermicro NAS. The stack table is a current snapshot of what the “production-inspired” toolchain looks like.

Two schools visible in those two repos: khuedoan’s four cheap SFF nodes with full bare-metal automation from nothing, vs theepicsaxguy’s fewer-bigger-boxes hypervisor with immutable Talos K8s on top. The shared core is the same: everything declarative, everything in Git, secrets externalized, ingress + TLS + SSO centralized.

A third school takes the same discipline one level deeper — Nix as the declarative substrate instead of GitOps-on-Kubernetes: nix-homelab (OSS) (badele, 528★) runs Hetzner/Infomaniak VPSes, physical servers, Pis and desktops as immutable NixOS machines under Clan (“Kill the cloud, build your darkcloud”), and chenglab (OSS) (eh8, 466★) runs a single ThinkCentre M710q Tiny with Nix flakes, home-manager, nix-darwin for the macOS laptops, sops-nix secrets, and root-on-tmpfs impermanence — the box wipes itself clean on every reboot and only what’s declared survives.

The contrast with the Homelab (KRZ single-node): rootless Podman Quadlets + systemd instead of Kubernetes — no cluster overhead on a single box, the same declarative-everything discipline via quadlet files in Git. The homelab genre’s real spectrum is not “which orchestrator” but “how much of the lifecycle is reproducible from the repo alone”.

Links: Homelab (this machine’s lab) · homelab-khuedoan (OSS) · homelab-theepicsaxguy (OSS) · nix-homelab (OSS) · chenglab (OSS) · Digital gardens (published from the same box)

Homelab candidates ledger

• EmbeddingGemma 2 + Qdrant 1-bit TurboQuant/MRL (2026-10-07, flagged by user “worth exploring for homelab”): multimodal embedder whose 10M-vector index squeezes 30 GB → 0.4-1 GB; pairs with the PolDense lane in the local-lm-roadmap embedding comparison. Not started.
• OpenFrame CLI (flamingo-stack; 2026-10-07): openframe bootstrap = one command → k3d cluster + full platform via ArgoCD app-of-apps; GKE/EKS via Terraform behind the same interface; prerequisite auto-install (Docker/k3d/Helm/Terraform/gcloud/AWS); pinned-version + SHA256 + cosign-verified binaries (“honest about security” — explicitly anti curl | bash); k9s-style status TUI; --non-interactive for automation. Caveat: heavy — 24 GB RAM/6 cores/50 GB local minimum (doombox qualifies). Lane: the bootstrap-tool genre done right; candidate for the k8s-rehearsal lane, not started.

PegaProx: the multi-cluster Proxmox control plane (2026-10-08)

gyptazy (v1.0 out of beta, enterprise support available) + pegaprox.com + project-pegaprox (OSS) (1.65k★ AGPL-3.0, Python; all captured): “fully free. No paid tier. No catch” — unified multi-cluster management for Proxmox VE and XCP-ng: cross-cluster live migration with automatic resource checks, load balancing via ProxLB, RBAC + 2FA + LDAP/OIDC/Entra SSO, audit log, AES-256 credential encryption, CVE scanning + automated PVE host hardening, native Ceph management (pools/OSDs/health), HA in 2-node configs (edge-friendly), ESXi migration wizard (“a strong post-Broadcom argument”). Two first-class UIs — a vCenter-like corporate layout (tree sidebar, dense tables, keyboard-first) and a modern dashboard (SSE gauges, PWA, 17 themes) — same RBAC/audit underneath. Security posture as product: two independent daily scanners (Aikido + CodeAnt), public Aikido report, 5-day triage SLA, GitHub Security Advisories disclosure. Field reports: 21 clusters/79 nodes centrally managed; rolling updates without node-by-node chaos. FrOSCon 2026 talk: “Was Proxmox im Enterprise-Umfeld gefehlt hat.” Homelab relevance: the doombox-oktadell lane runs Proxmox-adjacent stacks; PegaProx is the centralized-lane candidate if clusters multiply — free tier forever means no budget debate. Watch: production maturity on high-density clusters still to be proven (small team, 3 devs).

CNPG deep-dive: the four CRDs that matter (2026-10-08)

K8sArchitect → vipavani.medium.com “The Four CRDs That Matter. Zero DBAs.” (Medium Cloudflare-walled → r.jina.ai reader, hand-registered): the CNPG consolidation argument in full — the old stack (StatefulSet + Patroni + its DCS (etcd/Consul/ZooKeeper) + HAProxy + barman + manual TLS = five systems, config in five places, “debugging across five different systems… blast radius is huge”) collapses into four CRDs: Cluster (instances/version/storage/backup/TLS — operator spins up primary + hot standbys in streaming replication, TLS on by default with self-managed CA rotation, three auto-created Services -rw/-ro/-r; the instance manager is “PID 1 inside the pod — closer to systemd than to Patroni”; failover = liveness probe → replica promotion in seconds) · Pooler (PgBouncer as a first-class resource, horizontally scalable, 1000→10 multiplexing in transaction mode; prepared-statement caveat: session-scoped statements break across transaction-mode returns — PgBouncer 1.21+ max_prepared_statements helps but “not battle-tested in every ORM,” many teams fall back to session mode — test with your stack) · Backup/ScheduledBackup (continuous WAL shipping to S3/GCS/Azure, PITR, no barman server). Ops note from the field: metrics via PodMonitor + Prometheus, the old built-in exporter is deprecated. Fits the ledger’s cloudnative-pg (OSS) entry and the homelab Postgres lane: “PostgreSQL as a cloud service, self-hosted” — the same operators-for-everything argument as the Hermes operator capture, applied to the database.

Frolov’s illustrated floor-plan dashboard: the human-acceptance play (2026-10-09)

antonfrolov.substack.com (14.7 KB; captured): the family wouldn’t use the HA app, so he hired an environment artist (pixel-art plan died when he found one whose style fit) and built the dashboard as an illustration: every device its own layer (still “off” + 8-frame loop “on”), day + night versions of every floor, everything exported on ONE SHARED CANVAS at exact in-house positions — “that one rule saves days of lining things up later.” Tech stack is nearly stock HA: one picture-elements card per floor, state_image swaps still↔animated WebP by device state (the browser plays the animation — no code), conditional elements flip day/night via a sunrise/sunset-automated helper, tap_action: more-info reuses HA’s own dialogs, Browser Mod pop-up for the multi-valve irrigation icon, YAML-mode dashboards with per-floor element files included by both the floor view and the “full” exploded view (edit once, changes everywhere), vertical-stack + card-mod stacking, files served from /config/www. TV delivery: webOS does render WebP in-browser (the “doesn’t” claim is the photo viewer’s — “try it before you believe it”); no screensaver-setpage → HAOS Kiosk Display add-on on a spare HDMI input, Kiosk Mode to strip the menus, HA schedule switches the TV input morning/evening. The kicker: the TV is look-only (remote can’t drive it over HDMI) — and that’s what made the family install the app to actually tap things. Household fit: the 4B=HA plan gets its dashboard genre exemplar — the acceptance problem it solved is the same one the Pi-on-a-desk plan will meet (KLA test: is there an app-for-that resistance at home?), and the shared-canvas brief is reusable as an AI-commission spec (the exact package: architectural plan, room photos, style refs, dashboard examples, technical spec, paint codes).

Home Information: floor-plan-first property management (2026-10-10)

tom_doerr (207❤/10k views; tweet + repo captured, 888★ Python): cassandra/home-information — “manuals, maintenance records, and device controls mapped onto a visual floor plan, replacing scattered files with a single spatial dashboard for property management.” The positioning is the exact complement to Frolov’s floor-plan dashboard above: same spatial thesis (information organized by location and context, not by device type or vendor — “Where did you put the HVAC manual? When was the water heater last serviced? Which camera covers the back door?”), opposite layer of the stack — Frolov’s is a presentation genre (an artist-illustrated picture-elements skin over stock HA), Home Information is an application (Docker-one-liner at :9411, install.sh handles credentials + startup; manuals/warranties/documents positioned on floor plans, maintenance histories, multiple views — whole house / kitchen / security zones — and HA integration for device control + monitoring + alert rules). Links out to Paperless-ngx/HomeBox/Immich instead of competing. Household fit: the Pi-4B=HA roadmap node needs exactly this information layer (warranty PDFs + service dates are what paper drawers hold today); the two genres compose — Home Information for the records, an illustrated HA dashboard for the control surface, both anchored on the same floor plan.