My Home Server Setup: Part 2/N

My Home Server Setup: Part 1/N

In this part, I’ll be setting up Nomad and Consul cluster communicating internally using Tailscale VPN.
so I can schedule different workloads (I’ll discuss them in coming parts) on them.
I’ve added ansible for the all the parts of the installation which can be found in my DragonBallWorld GitHub repo

Below is HLD of the Nomad and Consul architecture which I’ve chosen for my Home Server.

Current Nomad + Consul Cluster Architecture of my Home Server

Tailscale Setup

I’ve written a ansible role to setup tailscale on my nodes. It can be found here.

Initially we’ll require non tailscale IP (ofc !) to run ansible on the nodes. I’ve my ~/.ssh/config to take care of username and ip

Host goku
    hostname SOMEIP1
    user itsjwala
Host gohan
    hostname SOMEIP2
    user itsjwala

To add tailcale_auth_key inside your `secrets.yml` variable file head over to tailscale admin panel and generate an auth key, you can decide between one-off or reusable key.

- include_vars: secrets.yml
  tags:
    - always

# ... skipped for brevity

- name: Install Tailscale
  apt:
    name: tailscale
    state: present
    update_cache: yes
  notify: enable tailscaled service

# .... 

- name: Bring Tailscale Up
  become: yes
  command: tailscale up --authkey={{ tailscale_auth_key }}
  register: tailscale_start
  when: '"100."  not in tailscale_status.stdout'
  notify: Confirm Tailscale is Connected

Once tailscale is setup, you can see it in by sshing into the node, or inside tailscale admin panel or on other clients ( my mac from which I’m running the ansible).. neat!

I updated my ~/.ssh/config to use tailscale IP now, so no changing of routers allocated IP going forward ( yeah I can do static IP on router page 😃)

Consul Setup

Ansible setup here

we’ll be required to setup consul first so Nomad can use it to do service discovery of Nomad nodes.

jinja templated consul config file.

datacenter = "DragonBallWorld"
data_dir = "/opt/consul/data"
encrypt = "{{ consul_encryption_key }}"

{% if is_server is defined and is_server %}
server = true
bootstrap_expect = 1
{% endif %}

client_addr = "{{ ansible_facts.tailscale0.ipv4.address }}"
bind_addr = "{{ ansible_facts.tailscale0.ipv4.address }}"
retry_join = ["{{ hostvars['gohan']['ansible_facts']['tailscale0']['ipv4']['address'] }}"]

ui = true

This line will ask consul agents to connect to gohan which is consul server

retry_join = ["{{ hostvars['gohan']['ansible_facts']['tailscale0']['ipv4']['address'] }}"]

is_server is picked up based on inventory hosts file

[DragonBallWorld]
goku
gohan is_server=True

consul_encrytion_key was generated using, this will ensure encrypted gossiping between accross network (overkill for now, can be skipped)

itsjwala@goku:~$ consul keygen
6vgkXs8JjT7tiDTXq9AWeVcl81zMkhyp6cN88kIZQk4=

The Beautiful UI looks something like this!

Consul UI

Nomad Setup

Ansible setup here

going through the config file

data_dir  = "/opt/nomad/data"

bind_addr = "{{ ansible_facts.tailscale0.ipv4.address }}"

datacenter = "DragonBallWorld"

{% if is_server is defined and is_server %}
server {
  enabled          = true
  bootstrap_expect = 1
  encrypt = "{{ nomad_encryption_key }}"
}
{% endif %}
client {
  enabled       = true
  host_network "tailscale" {
    cidr = "{{ ansible_facts.tailscale0.ipv4.address }}/32"
    reserved_ports = "22"
  }
  # ^^^ ignore for now, I'll use this host_network to schedule
  # internal applications
}

plugin "docker" {                  # <---- Install docker for this
  config {
    volumes {
      enabled      = true
    }
  }
}

plugin "raw_exec" {
  config {
    enabled = true
  }
}

telemetry {
  collection_interval = "15s"
  disable_hostname = true
  prometheus_metrics = true
  publish_allocation_metrics = true
  publish_node_metrics = true
}

consul {
  address = "{{ ansible_facts.tailscale0.ipv4.address }}:8500"
}
# ^^^ The consul agent which resides on each node

After Nomad is restarted. It will ask Consul for Nomad Clients discovery so they could form a cluster. and it happens automagically!

Consul UI

Since Nomad is binded on tailscale interface we’ll require to update NOMAD_ADDR to access nomad interface using cli

Nomad CLI

Also can be navigated using the Beautiful UI!

Nomad UI

Now that this is done, I’m also planning to add samba server on RPi.

I also plan to set up a few applications on them, the first being Caddyserver which is feature-rich (proxy, TLS certs auto-rotation, what not!)

more on it in later parts, till then see yeah 👋

My Home Server Setup: Part 3/N