I have a dedicated vm for things that are crucial to the home network, either latency-critical or network related.

That’d be my dns resolver (I enforce it over VLANs by hijacking anyone trying to do DNS to other resolvers, like random IoT devices), homebridge for less important home automaton and my own matter controller for most important home automaton (controlling the lights).

My router of choice is RouterOS in another VM. I tried opnsense, pfsense, vyatta, and a bunch of others (even a containerized Cisco route), and I settled on ROS, because it was the only one who could do IPv6 properly (apart from Cisco, but that has other issues).

For the less important things I run them on k8s and really, there are only two bits worth mentioning as essential: ArgoCD and nixhelm. Together, they provide effortless and mostly automated software updates with very easy rollbacks. I don’t have to go and manually update every single bit of software and that saves huge amounts of time.

I wonder if NixOS is a vacuum coffee maker for how confusing nix looks when you see it for the first time or instant coffee for how reproducible it is…

That’s a good point. Mind that in most production environments you’d be firewalled rather hard (especailly when it comes to logs processing which oftentimes ends up having PII). I wouldn’t trust any service that tries to use DoT or DoH in there that I couldn’t snoop on. Many deployments nowadays allow you to “punch” firewall holes based on the outgoing dns requests to an allowlisted domain, so chances are you actually want to use the glibc resolver and not try to be fancy.

That said, smaller images are always good in my book!

You’re nailing your goal then!

I would still steer you slightly towards documenting your architectural decisions more. It’s a good skill to have and will help you in a long run.

You have dozens of crate dependencies and only you know why they are in there. A high-level document on how your system interconnects and how the algorithms under the hood work will be a huge help to anyone who comes looking through your source code. We become better programmers not by reading the source code, but by understanding what it actually does.

Here’s a random trivia: your server depends on trust-dns-resolver. Why? Why wasn’t the stock resolver enough? Is that a design choice or you just wanted to have fun? There is no wrong answer but without the design notes it’s hard to figure your intent.

This looks nice, but there’s plenty free alternatives in this space which warrants a section in the readme with the comparison to other products.

You mention ram usage, but it’s oftentimes a product of event size. Based on your numbers, your average event size is about 800 bytes. Let’s call it 1kb. That’s one million events per day. It’s surely sounds more promising than Elastic, but not reaching Loki numbers, or, if you focus on efficiency, is way behind Victoriametrics Logs (based on peeking at their benches).

I think the important bits you need to add is how you store the logs (i.e. which indices you build) and what are your trade-offs. Grep is an efficient logs processor which barely uses any ram but incurs dramatic I/O costs, after all.

Enterprises will be looking at different numbers and they have lots of SaaS products to choose from. Homelab users are absolutely your target audience and you can have it by making a better UI than the alternative (victoriametrics logs aren’t that comfortable to work with) or making resource usage lower (people run k8s clusters on RPis, they sure wonder about every megabyte of ram lost) or making the deployment easier (fire and forget, and when you come to it, it works).

It sounds like lots of things and I don’t want to be discouraging. What you started there is really nice-looking. Good job!

You can enforce an always-on VPN (for at least ipsec) via an MDM profile. This kind of features isn’t found in the casual user setup options, but there’s plenty of knobs to tune in the enterprise profile configurator.

And yes, you can easily install that profile on your phone after.

I would absolutely recommend a file system with snapshot capabilities for a home server. One of btrfs mirror, dm-raid (raid5) with btrfs, or zfs would work. The practical differences would be negligible at this scale and you can just pick whatever you fancy.

I’ve been having sync issues with conduit lately, takes minutes for the mobile app to catch up. No way to purge old media, or to use something S3-compatible for its storage either.

Also, element x doesn’t support spaces, so if you want to bridge other chats into matrix they all are going to be messed up together.

I like matrix as a concept, but both servers and clients are in a bit of a shitshow state (same as xmpp was years ago).