The things I use
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
Built with Hugo, running on fly.io and served by Caddy.
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. |
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.