This is a decent writeup on applying “Zero Tust” principles to a home lab using mostly open source tools. I’m not the author, but thought it was worth sharing.
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Zero trust, but you have to use Amazon AWS, Cloudflare, and make your own Telegram bot? And have the domain itself managed by Cloudflare.
Sounds like a lot of trust right there… Would love to be proven wrong.
Yeah, I practice some ZeroTrust principles w/o using any of the above. I use Docker networks to associate services and their data and restrict them from accessing services/data they don’t need. I use HAProxy at the edge to route requests to specific nodes in my network, and all of that operates over my own WireGuard VPN. I’m working on creating VLANs for my network to further segment things, so I can dictate which devices can access which resources. For continuous monitoring and alerting, any separate device connected to my VPN would work (haven’t yet configured that); I personally don’t bother because my SO/kids will tell me if something they use goes down, and knowing a few minutes earlier wouldn’t matter.
You really don’t need AWS, Cloudflare, or Telegram for any of this. That said, it is interesting to read through when crafting your own solution, if only to check which parts you have and what parts you may have forgotten.
I’d say anyone wanting to go this deep into a home monitoring setup will likely go with what works best for them instead of reading and following the entirety of this guide… I’m one of those people…
Wrote my own log parsing software to put into a database, display and alert through grafana, which is alerting through a homemade webhook that sends a notification to ntfy based on severity… And I also use uptime Kuma like mentioned, but my notifications channel is ntfy. No cloudflare for my internal services, only wireguard to connect home and use everything. And definitely no telegram.
Plenty of other stuff setup, but my security alerts and monitoring rely heavily on the syslog/grafana server which helps me monitor everything.
I don’t meet all of the items here (my homelab setup is still a WIP), but here’s basically what I have:
- Cloudflare manages my domain and DNS, but nothing else; I only use them because they’re cheaper than my last registrar (Namecheap)
- VPS at Hetzner acts as my edge - HAProxy forwards packets based on SNI over my WireGuard VPN to the relevant device on my network
- I use Caddy on each device to handle TLS, and all services are inside docker with zero directly exposed ports
- each service only has access to the files and other containers it needs to accomplish the task
- my router is configured w/ static DNS, so all requests to services go to my domain name over TLS, but they don’t hit the WAN if I’m on my LAN
I don’t have continuous monitoring and alerting, mostly because the only people using my network are me, my SO, and my kids. I am planning on adding some alerting though, and I especially need to configure SMART reporting (had it configured at one time). So when I do that, I’ll add some dashboards for my various other services as well.
Some things I plan to add:
- backup and restore - I plan to use Backblaze, my main hurdle is that I don’t want to backup my large media files (movies and whatnot), and I haven’t put in the work to configure a service to handle backups; this is a top priority for me
- VLANs to separate devices - I want one network w/o internet access for my IP cameras, one for devices that need access to specific external sites (e.g. my smart TV, or a separate media device once I switch to a dumb TV), one for privileged services (e.g. my NAS, which will talk to multiple VLANs), and one for guests
- continuous monitoring and alerting - each device would report to a service on my VPS (or maybe a separate VPS)
- home automation system - my focus has been on replacing external services, and I don’t use an automation system yet, so I haven’t gotten to this; but I’m planning on using HomeAssistant as I roll out my other home monitoring stuff
So I’m probably halfway to what the OP has laid out. I don’t do this type of thing at work, and I don’t share anything outside my network, so I’m in no hurry. However, I do need to handle backups and SMART monitoring on my NAS ASAP, since those are the last glaring gaps in my setup.
This is more complicated than some corporate infrastructures I’ve worked on, lol.
