#homelab #infrastructure #blog *2024-09-25* With a number of radio projects and other things around the house, watching them all has started to be a thing. Sometimes the [[Trunk Recorder Server]] stops operating and uploading to OpenMHz, sometimes other things stop working, and I’d really like to find a way to pull stats from the KiwiSDR regarding various aspects of the spectrum over time. The problem is I _really_ don’t want to become a “homelab guy” running Proxmox and juggling a bunch of VM’s. I _really_ don’t want to have to deal with redundancy and such in a way like I do at work or be running some eye sore cluster of machines that are incredibly noisy and take up a bunch of space I really don’t have. I would like to: * Run some docker containers or k8s manifests with configurations backed up to the cloud. I do not want to ship metrics and logs from home to the Internet * Play with some larger projects at home utilizing things like OpenStreetMap data and such. * Minimally automate the thing in so as much I can _mostly_ automate it, but not feel beholden to a bunch of configuration templates I need to maintain. * Move my Plex setup from a RaspberryPi to something beefier for transcoding reasons. * Actually use the thing like a computer should I choose to. I gave some thought to picking up yet-another-small server but this time something like a [Thinkcentre m910](https://www.microcenter.com/product/674922/lenovo-thinkcentre-m910-tiny-desktop-computer-(refurbished)) rather than yet another Raspberry Pi, but I don’t think it was going to keep up with what I intend on throwing at it and it might be painful to use as a computer. Instead of buying something new which really isn’t in the budget anyway, I decided to repurpose my gaming PC that I don’t really play games on anyway. It has a Intel i7-9700KF @ 4.900GHz and 32Gb of RAM so it should be able to do things I want to do at home. If I need more hardware than that, I can go to the cloud as I’m talking about monitoring radios here. I made this big big list of requirements and such, tried mentally juggling how I might run it all in Windows with virtualization or something, but then I had a *fuck it* moment and just installed Fedora 40 Workstation on the thing. I threw together a [minimal Anisble setup](https://github.com/skord/dankbox/blob/main/workstation.yaml) to automate some basics as well as serve as a reminder as to what’s on it. I absolutely do not intend on keeping the Ansible any more updated than it is unless I find it useful for some future difficult to setup and document project. It installs some basic packages, a version manager for some dev stuff, setups up my shell basically, puts some radio software on there and that’s it. Checks #3 bullet point above. Bullet point #5 above, using it like a computer has worked amazingly well. My work laptop is a baller Thinkpad Carbon X1 that has all the specs maxxed out and weighs like half of my iPad + Magic Keyboard so I am familiar with it. From past experiences and reading things on the Internet I thought it would be hell to get NVIDIA drivers working, but it was as simple as installing one package and rebooting. Steam was a quick install and EDF5 and EDF6 run flawlessly and better than they did in Windows. I am actually really impressed here. I will get to the other bullet points, but this has been a really nice experience and I’m happy with it. A side note is that I have become a little more frustrated with some of the limitations in Obsidian Publish. I have a Kanban board with projects and statuses of home things that I’d like to publish, but that’s not going to happen. I also have to rearrange the blog folder every time I write and I don’t like that. I’d also like to publish some of the radio data automatically, but there’s really no good way to do that either. I’ve come to find that it’s _really_ easy to delete entire folders in Obsidian and difficult to bring them back. I used to git version my notes, but gave up on this so I could use sync/publish on devices as well as computers and I regret it a lot. These are things I’m going to ponder on more. It’s a really elegant solution except when it’s not. In the meantime I’m going to try and document what is in the Homelab and why I find it interesting.