Off-White

The Roamlab: Putting the "No" in Innovation

A few months ago, I did something stupid. But you'll need a little context. I am building a homelab. I don't intend to host a large website, or anything useful, but it's definitely more than a single host to test scripts on. I've been slowly accumulating hardware for the last year or so, and acquiring solutions to find problems for. In other words, it's been great! Now, with homelabs, one thing you'll typically notice is their stability. They're usually set up in the home, in a rack or on a shelf. That's boring. Let's break that rule, shall we?

< image unavailable, so imagine if you will: a backpack of decent size, filled with a large desktop PC, a nest of power cables, CAT 5e cables, a power strip, and multiple smaller computers. Zipped up, it all closes cleanly (airflow be damned), all topped off with a PlayStation 3 Eye Camera strapped to the handle by its own USB cable. >

This is the Roamlab, my effort to make my lab architecture portable.

< network diagram also unavailable, but in the theatre of the mind, picture a cloud connected downwards to a router, connected downwards to a switch, connected downwards to the 4 computers placed in various pockets, with their various VMs and webservices connecting in further subdivisions below. >


Systems

Router

Outdated 10/100Mbit router

Switch

TP-Link Unmanaged switch

Cranberry (Laptop)

ASUS Aspire xxxxx

Sascrotch (Server)

Inspiron 7710

Berry (Server)

Raspberry Pi 3B+

Winger (Server)

Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q SFF PC

Services

Winger (Hypervisor)

Skimbleshanks (Ansible)

Ansible scripting server, mainly used to trigger clean shutdowns of all machines prior to shutting down power to the backpack

Raspberry (ZeroTier Bridge)

Services

ZeroTier Bridge

Connects to the ZeroTier virtual L2 connection, allows outside access Basically a VPN without the public IP

Uptime-Kuma

Simple uptime monitor Would have used LibreNMS, but nothing here has SNMP agent functionality built-in afaik