Rebuilding My Homelab with Compose, Ruby, IPv6, and No Kubernetes

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Rebuilding My Homelab with Compose, Ruby, IPv6, and No Kubernetes

Last updated 2026-07-10, 7 min read

A little less than a year ago I wrote:

Everything is in shambles.

One machine is dead and probably not coming back.<br>Services are randomly scattered amongst the survivors.<br>My Kubernetes project is kinda-sorta paused.

This post is an addendum to that one, where I'm going to give an overview of what I've settled on, as much as one can settle in a homelab.

To recap a bit, in the previous post I had a bunch of machines that were mashed together into something resembling a coherent cluster:

hypnotoad, crushinator, and a precarious control plane VM running on a thin client

lrrr, an N150 box running Proxmox

nibbler, a piece of shit

Of those four machines, lrrr is the sole survivor.

The Problem of Nibbler

Nibbler, on television, is an adorable little three-eyed dude in Futurama that (courtesy spoiler warning, but 20 years is well past my cutoff) turns out to be a member of a hyperintelligent race of beings that can time travel and who, in fact, is the reason why Fry fell into the cryopod to start with.

nibbler, in my basement, was a machine that I had pinned a lot of hope on. It was a Lenovo M80s Gen3 SFF with an i7-12700 and DDR5 memory, picked up on eBay for what seemed like a steal (foreshadowing).<br>I upgraded the memory to 128GB and the storage to 3TB of NVMe with left over pocket change.<br>I put an HBA in it and hung a disk shelf off of it with seven 16TB drives.<br>It was to be the core server, the one where all the action would happen.

It was, as covered earlier, a piece of shit.

I'm still not quite sure what was wrong, but it was never reliable.<br>Often it would just not come up after a reboot. Once in a while it would just forget about hardware.

On more than one occasion I or my spouse would discover that Jellyfin wouldn't play anything anymore, and I would shuffle down to the basement to attach a monitor and keyboard and discover that the entire storage disk shelf was errored out with inscrutable SAS adapter driver errors in the kernel logs.

Around the time I wrote the previous piece I put together a likely story. The eBay seller knew this machine was bad but they slapped an "eBay Certified Refurbished" label on anyway and sold it for a song to a sucker.<br>By the time I realized this I had modified the machine so extensively I couldn't make a refund claim.

The Problem of Kubernetes

Simultaneous to the nibbler revelations I had another realization: Kubernetes is Too Hard.<br>I built a system that I didn't actually know how to maintain without the time or energy necessary to dig myself out of trouble.<br>When the machine that has more cores and memory than every other machine in the cluster combined decides to self-immolate once or twice a week it puts a huge damper on the whole experiment.

My stop-gap solution was to revert everything important back to the way things were before k8s, which was effectively just docker compose.<br>After letting that bake for a while I decided to just roll with it.

You Know What They Say About Temporary Solutions

It's now July of 2026.

lrrr exists in much the same form as it did before.<br>It's still running Proxmox, but the only virtual things there are one LXC running Omada and one tiny VM that I've been using to ease myself into the agentic lifestyle.<br>I've also done the worst thing imaginable to the Proxmox forum trolls: I've installed Docker on the host to run core services like Home Assistant and friends.

hypnotoad and crushinator are turned off, lying in state until I need them again.

morbo is a new-to-me HP Elitedesk 800 G3 SFF that runs TrueNAS SCALE and whose entire job is to manage storage and stay out of the way and it does a great job. The end.

ord-router is a VM running at a datacenter in Chicago that happens to have direct peering with Comcast. This is the public ingress node.

nibbler is now an amalgamation of old and new parts: same memory, same storage, new gamer-style case and motherboard and processor (Ryzen 9 9900X). It also recently gained an RTX 5060ti 16GB video card for local LLM experiments.<br>This is the "everything else" machine. Everything that isn't critical to the house functioning as a house and the network as a network runs here.

Among other things, nibbler is where Forgejo, Minecraft, and Jellyfin and friends live, along with a bunch of other random crap.

There are also a handful of Raspberry Pi-class devices scattered around that are also deployed with this system, but they do appliance-type things: house-pi runs a Z-Wave stick and shed-pi is where the ADS-B receivers are plugged in.

Docker Compose with Extra Steps

Quirky? Yeah, let's go with quirky.

The software stack that deploys the homelab is arranged like this:

a bunch of spicy docker compose stacks

a handful of Ruby libraries that implement the spice

a...