The things I use

Posted on Nov 9, 2021

Inspired by others (uglyduck.ca, kevq.uk) this page will list (some) of the things I use in my everyday (tech) life.

Hardware

Laptop

My current main machine, bought used in late 2021.

Model Apple Macbook Air M1
Memory 8 GB
Storage 256 GB
OS macOS

Workstation

Mostly used for gaming and photo editing.

Motherboard ASUS Z170-E
CPU Intel® Core™ i7-6700K Processor
Memory 16 GB
Storage 512 GB
GPU NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080
OS NixOS, Windows 10

atomic

I accidentally the whole FreeBSD installation when swapping the boot drives, so now we are back on Linux again! Podman is nice.

Motherboard SuperMicro X11SSL-F
CPUs Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1245 v5
Memory 32 GB ECC UDIMM
Storage ~1 TB SSD, ~16 TB HDD
OS Ubuntu 22.04
Networking 1×1 Gbps, 2×10 Gbps

Some things running on this machine:

  • Home Assistant OS (as a VM)
  • SMB/NFS shares
  • PostgreSQL
  • restic for backups
  • A bunch of containers

resolver & monitor

Two Fujitsu S920 computers with AMD GX-222GC CPUs & 8 GB RAM. One does DNS & DHCP, the other runs network monitoring and metrics collection from other machine.

For monitoring I use LibreNMS (SNMP) and Prometheus exporters. Most hosts run the node-exporter (with TLS), and for a lot of services I use specific exporters. For visualization I use grafana.

For DNS I use knot-resolver for…duh…resolving & knot for my internal zones. I use RPZ for doing ad- and malware blocking. I used to use PiHole but wanted DNS over TLS (and DNSSEC) so I still had to install a resolver, so I just skipped PiHole. For DHCP I still use ISC Kea.

Both machines runs Debian 11. I wish I ran FreeBSD on the monitoring node as ZFS on root is amazing.

Hostname Model CPU Memory Storage OS
resolver Fujitsu S920 AMD GX-222GC 8 GB 8 GB Debian 11
monitor 64 GB

pioneer

I replaced my old, still working, Qotom box with a 30 EUR thin client. Specifications aren't amazing, but it does an amazing job with routing, firewalling and traffic shaping.

Model Fujitsu S920
CPU AMD GX-415GA
Memory 2 GB
Storage 8 GB
OS Debian 11
NICs 1+4×1 Gbps

I'm also using the crowdsec-firewall-bouncer which feels nice.

kubernetes cluster

I got lucky and bought a few Intel NUCs for a great price, and decided to use them for a kubernetes cluster at home.

Role # Model CPU RAM
Control plane 3 Fujitsu S920 AMD GX-222GC 8 GB
Worker nodes 3 Intel NUC11TNKI3 Intel Core i3 1115G4 16 GB

It's a shame I'm not using these machines more, as they are amazing!

SBCs

These are the SBCs currently in some kind of 'production'.

Name Model Use
goblin ASUS Tinkerboard S Internal certificate authority
colony ASUS Tinkerboard zigbee2mqtt
rfxtrx Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB rfxtrx for 433 MHz radio
rtlsdr Raspberry Pi Zero W rtlsdr, also 433 MHz radio
acrobat OrangePi Zero cups-server

Software

This blog

Applications

Emacs For reading my email (mu4e + isync), for nearly all text editing, and much more. I've been an avid user of org-mode since my university days, starting approx. 2009 or so.
kitty A terminal emulator
Firefox Because reasons :)
Ansible Anything can be done with a few hundred lines of yaml!

Services

Self-hosted

A lot of self-hosted services, mostly hosted on my home network. These are (mostly) running in containers, except for Home assistant which is running on it's own virtual machine.

Miniflux Great RSS reader, I use it literally every day!
Home assistant Used it since 2017, great from day one but has only improved since.
Mosquitto I'm using MQTT for a lot of use cases at home.
Grafana Used both for sensor data and to analyze system performance
InfluxDB Time series database, both systems and sensor data
PostgreSQL For Miniflux, Home assistant and others
Syncthing For syncing files between computers
Navidrome Great way to access my music collection in a browser!
step-ca Great piece of software! Manages my internal certificates, and the ACME backend makes sure that everything uses TLS internally.
grocy A proper ERP system for my fridge :-)
Restic + restserver Self-hosted backups, I really like restic-restserver.
matrix-synapse My private chat server! I use the excellent spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy playbook to install and update the installation.
netbox Keeps track of my networks, hosts and virtual machines.
authelia adf

Managed

Stuff I'm using but not hosting myself (yet):

Bitwarden My password manager of choice, a paying customer for a great number of years.
sr.ht For my git repositories and their build service.
Pocket For all the things I'll probably never manage to read
healthchecks.io For noticing if any scheduled job fails to run as expected. Backups, internal certificate renewals…

Networking

My 'core' network is run through a Ruckus Brocade 7150-C12P, and the network is pretty heavily segmented into different VLANs (10+) for different purposes.

For WiFi I'm using two TP-Link EAP 245v3. I'm using CAT6 cables for everything I can.

I also really appreciate plain old nftables, even after 10+ years of using OpenBSD/FreeBSD PF. It's easy to write and read, and allows for some really nice rules with verdict maps, concatenations and so forth. In the past I've used Shorewall to avoid typing iptables rulesets.