Home-Lab

You know that feeling when you solve a complex problem and everything just works? That’s exactly how I felt completing my latest knitting marathon. As someone who spends her days wrangling cloud infrastructure, I’ve discovered that knitting scratches the same problem-solving itch in surprisingly similar ways. Over the past few years, I’ve been treating knitting patterns like code repositories - each project a new challenge to debug, optimize, and deploy. And just like my home lab projects, some turn out better than others. Let me walk you through my recent “releases” and what I learned along the way. ...

When I set up my home lab with a Synology DS420j NAS, I wanted a project that would let me explore Claude’s API capabilities in a practical, everyday context. The result is a Python pipeline that takes photos from my NAS, hands them to Claude, and automatically generates and publishes a fully formatted blog post to my Hugo static site on GitHub. Here’s how I built it. The Hardware The foundation of this project is straightforward: a Synology DS420j — a 4-bay NAS — connected to a home router via a network switch. The NAS serves as the central storage layer, holding photos in a dedicated shared folder (blog/photos/latest/) that the pipeline reads from. The DS420j runs Synology’s DSM operating system and is accessible at a reserved local IP address, which makes it a reliable and addressable part of the home network. ...

In this post: What is Ansible Installing Ansible Authentication Inventories Playbooks Testing Ansible What is Ansible? Ansible is an open-source infrastructure as code tool provided by Red Hat. Instead of agents, Ansible relies on SSH to pass tasks defined in YAML to remote machines. To get familiar with Ansible, I created a simple scenario where a bash script needed to be uploaded to a remote machine and ran periodically. ...

Kubernetes provides a framework to orchestrate multiple containers, verses working with one container at a time. To practice managing containers I opted to build a Kubernetes cluster on Raspberry Pis using Rancher. Rancher came about soon after Docker introduced containers to the market, and provides an open-source platform for enterprises to easily use Kubernetes in their environment. K3S is a Rancher product that allows you to deploy a Kubernetes cluster using a single binary file thats less than 40MB. K3S is ideal for Raspberry Pis, since traditionally building a Kubernetes cluster on Pis could be too much for them to handle. In addition to K3S this is what I used to build a simple Kubernetes cluster in my home lab: ...

Introduction to Terraform Terraform by Hashicorp is a “tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently”. Terraform works using infrastructure as code, meaning that build a blueprint of the resources you need in a configuration file (with the .tf extension) and Terraform builds that infrastructure for you. The Terraform package itself is a single binary file, easily downloaded, and is used to build/edit/destroy your resources. In contrast to older versions of infrastructure build tools like Packer, Terraform allows you to create infrastructure across multiple cloud providers and is “smart” enough to know how many more machines to create in context of what you already have. For example, if you have 5 servers on Azure, but you want 10, Terraform will build 5 more for you to bring you to a total of 10 versus building 10 more servers and leaving you with 15. ...

Practicing installing/updating/building machines is much more fun when you aren’t running the risk of ruining an entire computer. To give myself a safe environment to work in, I have been using VMware’s vSphere in our home lab for many of my computer projects. vSphere is a suite of virtualization products that allow you to create and manage VMs. This allows me to work on VMs that can run any OS I like, and if I something goes wrong I can just delete the VM and begin again. ...