Automating my Homelab with Ansible (AnsibleFest 2022)

At AnsibleFest 2022, I presented Ansible for the Homelab.

In the presentation, I gave a tour of my homelab, highlighting it's growth from a modem and 5-port switch to a full 24U rack with a petabyte of storage and multiple 10 gigabit switches!

Then I spent some time discussing how various components are automated using Ansible, mostly using open source projects on GitHub.

Unfortunately for attendees, the room my session was in was packed, and a lot of people who wanted to see it were turned away.

Luckily I also pre-recorded the presentation and posted it on my YouTube channel. So now everyone can watch it!

I mentioned a number of Ansible playbooks and open source projects in the presentation; here's a list of all of them:

• You can get a free copy of my book Ansible for DevOps—feel free to pass along the link to others!
• My Dad and I upgraded my 20U rack to a new, much deeper 24U rack on the Geerling Engineering YouTube channel—and we had a little too much fun!
• Last year I built the PetaPi - a single Raspberry Pi addressing a petabyte of storage.
• See how I use a Raspberry Pi to monitor my home Internet.
• For fast, low-latency video editing, I built an All-SSD Edit NAS running TrueNAS.
• I recently started Monitoring my ASUS WiFi router with Prometheus and Grafana.
• See My Backup Plan, which includes the scripts I run on one of the Raspberry Pis in my rack to back things up to Amazon Glacier.
• Drupal Pi is what I'm currently using to serve the Drupal website pidramble.com directly from my home.
• I'm currently testing a number of open source NVR (Network Video Recorder) applications on the Raspberry Pi, and documenting my work in my pi-nvr project.
• One of the Raspberry Pis in my rack runs Pi-VPN, giving me access to my homelab from anywhere.
• I even manage my two Macs, using the popular Mac Development Ansible Playbook.
• I'm experimenting setting up a Raspberry Pi-based Router to either supplement my existing Internet connection or replace my current ASUS router.

I put a listing of all the Homelab equipment I'm currently using (as of October 2022) in the description of the YouTube video.

If you have any other questions about my homelab, or how I automate different parts of it, please feel free to ask in the comments! I may do a more formal 'homelab tour' later this year or early next year, so make sure you're subscribed to my YouTube channel to see it!