Do you know the feeling when you planned to do just some little changes and few days later you realize you might have gone a bit overkill with your setup? I do now. No new hardware here at What's up, home dungeon, but my Linux laptop has now a bit different setup and I'm probably not even done yet. What I'm doing is that I'm exploring the treasures and gems brought us to by the fantastic world of open-source. Thank you, everybody who makes this possible!
What's new in my home lab infra, you might ask. A lot. Welcome to this little tour around the new neighbourhood of mine. These tools are so fast to install and get up and running that I actually started this project only few days after Zabbix Summit 2024, during the summit my laptop was running on Qubes OS.
Time for new hypervisor
Me as a distro-hopper installed Proxmox VE as the base system for my Linux laptop. Currently it is running few virtual machines and containers mostly for fun, some for experiments and some for What's up, home.
So far my experience with Proxmox has been very positive. But do I monitor it? Of course I do, and of course that happens with Zabbix as it has a native Proxmox template.
But why Proxmox? I'm sure it's totally overkill for everything I do, but that's part of the fun. No matter if I need to spin up a new container or Turnkey appliance or a virtual machine, it has that. I can easily snapshot and backup stuff and go as complex as I want, just to make me trip on my own shoelaces.
It's not fun and it's not a learning experience if I don't occasionally break something.
What would all this be without new firewall?
One of the VMs running on my Proxmox runs OPNSense. It's an open-source next-generation firewall, IPS/IDS and so much more. What I'm going to do with it? I'm routing few of my Proxmox virtual machines through it to inspect the traffic and play around with some interesting things.
If the mind-boggling functionality provided out-of-the-box is not enough for you, OPNSense comes with tons of installable plugins, all just mouse click away.
Of course, as OPNSense has an official Zabbix SNMP template AND it has an up-to-date Zabbix agent -- OPNSense runs on FreeBSD after all --, I monitor this, too, with my Zabbix. Note that there's both Zabbix agent and SNMP based monitoring going on just for fun, and because they give different kind of data.
Configuring the agent can be done from OPNSense web UI.
What would all this be without a new host provisioning system?
To make things even more interesting, I installed Foreman, or Foreman with its Katello plugin. What's Foreman? It's basically the same than Red Hat Satellite, but a free, open-source version of it, and in my understanding is to Red Hat Satellite what Fedora is for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Foreman allows provisioning, maintaining and reporting just about everything about your hosts and environment and has way too many features for me to list here. Anyway, it shows me all kinds of cool stuff, such as quick info about the container that's running my Foreman:
... info about installed packages:
... if there's anything to restart ...
... or if there would be any updates to install.
It can also deep-dive into my Proxmox and even control the power status of the VMs.
Am I monitoring Foreman with Zabbix? Not yet, but there would be this old template that at least used to work when I last used Foreman somewhere else, basically being cool because it could alert if suddenly X percentage of hosts were not reporting to Foreman.
