Having finally had a FTTP connection installed at my home from YouFibre I thought it was about time I cleaned up my HomeLab and reorganised everything whilst moving from my G-Fast connection to the new FTTP one. Whilst I could just reconfigure my router, my setup has become a bit haphazard over the past 2 years with devices hanging on cables and my servers not getting much love as I decorated my house. With this in mind I decided to start from scratch and reconfigure everything.

When experimenting with what I could do on a random old computer 10 years ago I had no idea I was getting into the HomeLab community and whilst what I want to get out of a HomeLab has changed over this time, the key overarching principal I try and stick to has not, providing a place I can try out new technologies and platforms I might not get a chance to experiment with in a production environment.

With this in mind my current aims are to try the following:

• Automate everything (as much as I possibly can)
• Learn more about routing protocols
• Setup and manage IPv6
• Setup and experiment with a range of virtualisation options

Given these aims I decided it was time to plan the lab environment a bit more and provide a core that I could build and experiment on top of whilst not breaking some core functionality every time I try something new. This has lead me down a few rabbit holes on the internet including /r/homelab and their discord community, with loads of interesting ideas coming to me after seeing what others are doing in their labs I decided to get a little more serious with my HomeLab.

After planning and thought over what I wanted to do this time around I decided on the following core setup:

• Build a new router and run pfSense on this
• Register my own ASN and IPv6 Subnet
• Use Metal as a Service from Canonical to manage as much of the physical hardware as possible
• Use CoreDNS to provide internal DNS for my hostnames
• Document the lab using Netbox and BookStack
• Create an internal certificate authority (including ssh certificate authority) using smallstep and step-ca
• Monitoring via Loki, Prometheus and Grafana
• Automate with Ansible
• Finally migrate my smart home to Home Assistant

Keep an eye out for more posts as I go on this journey and get everything up and running, If you’re interested in what hardware I currently have in my lab take a look at [L