Day 2 of building my own Homelab is not going well. There are a couple of basic services I would like to move away from the Raspberry Pi, or at least build a secondary backup service. That’s a pihole and a Samba share – but its not going well. I think i’m struggling somewhere with the networking or the firewall.
The Pihole is getting stuck with multiple problems. Initially when I installed it the Gravity DB would not get updated because the DNS resolution was not working. Somehow it didn’t want to connect to the internet. Upon digging I found that the DNS resolution on my host machine was not setup correctly. Then I learned about 3 different ways the network is managed on a modern Ubuntu server these days. The latest being something called Netplan. After a lot of hours spent figuring this out I finally got Netplan to configure DNS working fine on my host and that seemed to have done the trick. Oh, and also there’s a simple way to manage firewall on Ubuntu which is ufw. Managed to get these issues resolved, but the DNS queries are not coming through. Dropping the idea of a secondary Pihole for the time being; might pick it up later.
The Samba share was a different story. Started off by trying to see if I could get OpenMediaVault installed but that seemed too elaborate and heavy for my basic initial purposes. So I dropped it and got rid of it. Setting up simple Samba was not easy as well. The service hangs at the start and then times out. Then later on after a few hours of brain bashing, I found that if I could run the Samba daemon on its own in the background and not as a service, I could manage to connect to it from the iPhone. I had also forgotten to create a Samba user. After the initial connection from the iPhone was successful, I was then able to connect via the Mac. A bit more tinkering later I was able to mount the USB Space Capsule at boot as well as start the smbd and nmbd daemons at boot.
This completes the “Day 2” part of the Home Lab. I now have a basic infrastructure, a basic network with reverse proxy accessible over the internet, a custom domain and basic network storage via Samba. This enabled me to setup Plex for Movies and Music. I’m worried about security though – need to explore some options with this before I delve into bigger experiments like NextCloud. For now, let’s enjoy some music from my self hosted music streaming service!
