Architecure at Home

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Overall architecture

The diagram above shows the architecture I have deployed at home. The various components are listed below:

  • Router (pfSense): This is an Intel Alder Lake N100 Mini PC costing just S$270 installed with the enterprise level router software based on FreeBSD.

  • Mini PC1: This Asus PN51-S1 Mini PC has an AMD R7-5700U CPU with 8 Cores/16 Threads runs FreeBSD with each container running in a Bastille managed jail. This is ideal for long running containers.

  • Mini PC2: This recent addition - an Asus NUC 15 Pro U5-225H with Intel Core Ultra 5-225H is a Q1 2025 released CPU featuring 14 cores. It runs the ProxMox which allows us to run Linux based VMs or LXC containers and provides a very user friendly web interface to manage your VMs and containers.

pfSense Router

  • This router runs my home network and runs the pfBlocker-NG firewall package which blocks known malicious sites from making any request to anything behind the firewall on my home network.

  • It runs a DHCP server for the 192.168.0.1/24 network with static IP address from 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.29 and DHCP leases from 192.168.1.30 to 192.168.1.254.

  • It provides Network Address Translation (NAT) for incomming HTTP and HTTPS requests which are directed to the NGINX based reverse web proxy.

Reverse Proxy

  • The NGINX reverse proxy fronts all incoming HTTP & HTTPS requests and sends this forward to the appropriate IP address that are usually hosted in one of the containers on one of the Mini PCs.

  • It also reuqests and automatically renews the Let’s Encrypt certificate for all incoming HTTPS requests for the two domains we host - thomas-pk.com and philiptk.com

  • It is also configured in such a way that any container that requires authentication has to go through the Authelia container.