Telegram and Homelab

Telegram controlled Homelab

The problem

Lately I’ve finally moved my rack to another floor in my house. This on the one hand is more convenient in terms of space management, but brings a series of complications from the management and maintenance of the servers inside the rack; Furthermore, with the fact that I live (almost) permanently in Turin to pursue my university studies, finding a solution to take a quick look at the situation of the machines becomes an imperative.

My solution

Telegram.
Telegram is an application that makes remote communication between man and machine relatively easy thanks to bots.
Using the Telegram API and a bit of python code I’m developing a script to be able to execute commands on the servers, check the status of the containers or simply see if all the hosts are up

Remote integration

The Project is almost complete, in now in testing phase. Basically all it does is send various types of command (ansible playbook) and send back server statuses ecc. I used Ansible for basically all the “command sender” part, it makes easier to send complete playbook to different host starting from a single node; then i had to code the custom command runner (so a single command not in a playbook) and i also used ansible because i didn’t want to use different kind of comunication protocol.

Other than have a remote “control” of physical machines i also added a docker support (even this is made with ansible) needed in a homelab to see the status of some container in my home servers.

Authors

• @filippo-ferrando