Personally will be trying to transform my server which is currently in a fractal R5 case, into a small-ish Homelab rack, combined with all my network equipment. Will require complete relocation of all network equipment in the house as well as cables so it will be a bit of a project. Also on the lookout for a good quality rack so let me know if you have any recs. Still unsure if u want to do full width rack or mini. Part of me really want the UDM Pro from Unifi…
What are your goals and thing you want to accomplish during 2025?
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Got a 3 year old kid with another on the way. I just need it to be reliable so the kid can watch Sesame Street and the lights keep working.
I want to move my whole server to NixOS. It’s gotten to the point where I have no idea where all the Ubuntu config files went, and handling half of it via Docker vs baremetal. I hope this will allow me to set up proper backups as well, and maybe get better at Nix! I started a few days ago using the VM feature, but it’s tricky to work on for now, perhaps I haven’t found the right workflow.
I went this route from the start and love it. In case you need some resources:
- VimJoyer is excellent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a67Sv4Mbxmc
- Do secrets using SOPS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5f6GC7SnhU
- NixOS and Restic are an amazing combination, full backups in 20 lines of config. This article was my best find for this: https://francis.begyn.be/blog/nixos-restic-backups . Tip: you can easily write systemd services to trigger each software’s preferred backup strategy and simply schedule them to run before the Restic backup - I have them all copy the backups to one folder that then Restic backs up, works great for me!
Hope this helps a bit. I found the effort to be very worth it, but took me almost half a year to get comfortable with it.
Another vote for restic, best backup software I’ve ever used.
Thank you! It definitely does, I will be using that Restic article for sure! I actually use NixOS on my main laptop, which I found via Vimjoyer’s videos. It’s great, though I wish documentation for more advanced usage was more readily available. I started making the server, currently my biggest roadblock is testing the infrastructure without going live (I made the flake generate a VM for now but it takes a long time to build it every edit and I can’t even get ssh working) and figuring out how I’ll eventually install it with minimal downtime.
On the topic of build times, it took me too long to learn that nixos-rebuild supports remote build workers and targets.
For example, if I am editing on my laptop, want to build on my desktop, and apply the build to my file server, then I’d run…
me@laptop$ nixos-rebuild test \ --flake ~/wherever-it-lives \ --build-host desktop \ --target-host file-server \ --use-remote-sudoThe host names should match the name of the nixosConfiguration output from your flake. If they don’t I think you can specify like,
--target-host .Remote sudo avoids having to SSH as root.
Bonus tip: Having Tailscale on every machine makes this work reliably from anywhere, network speed as the limit.
Is there a reason(s) you’re doing NixOS over something like ProxMox? A friend of mine has been moving his lab over to ProxMox containers so i was thinking to do the same thing, but curious about NixOS since I’ve seen a few people mention it. Thanks!
The entirety of Nix configuration is in somewhere between 1 and 3 files depending on how you like your poison.
It’s immutable, so stuff can’t just change on you.
Every change you make is stored into a new configuration and you can roll back to any configuration you’ve ever done with a reboot, so it’s kind of hard to brick it.
Apps can’t just go in and modify your users or your host table or any of the other configs so it’s got an extra layer of security. But then, the package system has more packages than God and is maintained by a million randos with very little oversight.
It has some substantially neat tricks. I moved from one box to another by just doing a fresh install, moving its three configuration files and letting syncthing rebuild my home directory from my other box.
I think, if I were going to use Nix as a home server, I just install all of the services directly on the OS. Updates and configurations for everything would be maintained by Nix itself.
Nix is great if your fine with the packages and configuration they provide. If you want other stuff or features not provided it is a giant pain in the ass and not worth it. And you’ll get oh just write a flake or just write a package file for it.
Tried it didn’t like it. To much work to get somethings working. Went back to docker.
Start setting one up.
Have fun!
Same!
Might get around to tidying this 20-year-old mess up a bit - tho I’m not sure where to start lol.
I am not a proud man.
I appreciate you posting your balls like this.
Fuck it it works. Lol
I think what I need to do correctly on my homelab this year, is setup off-site backups. I currently only backup to seperate drives and machines inside my own home. I need to setup something at my parents place to take weekly and monthly backups.
Other than that, my media server needs a bigger storage drive.
Hetzner storage box is super cheap and works with rclone. They have a web interface for configuring regular zfs snapshots too so you don’t have to worry about accidental deletions/ransomware.
True. I’d have to get the €11/month box for it though. It’s cheaper to set up one of my Raspberry Pi’s with an external drive I already have. I just need to figue out how it’s best to transfer and dedublicate the data. :)
Nope, you don’t need any VPS to use it, it comes with an SFTP interface.
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/
offsite backup for $2/TB and no download fees, 1/3rd the price of B2.
Yeah. I would need the 5 TB one for my stuff, so that is the €11/month box.
Ah, ok I see.
Personally I’d recommend restic and backblaze b2 if I were you. Dedup and quick.
only need dedup if your data is duplicated
Which they expressly said they wanted in the comment I responded to…
I got no backups ao ur doing better than me. If 1 ssd dies there goes all my data.
Backups are key! Need to work on this myself too!
I snagged an old fiber LTO5 drive… just got to work out how to get it powered and then spend hours fiddling with silly old tapes.
get around cgnat finally
Tailscale? 👉👈 🥺
That’s what I’m currently using and it doesn’t cut it, especially for streaming movies
New provider, VPS, or CloudFlare tunnels.
Actually have a decent backup system and data repetition
This, my ssd randomly disappeared on my proxmox server January 1st so I had to start from scratch. Didn’t have any docker compose backups or lxc backups… I suppose this time I can do everything right now lol
Moving to a rack is nice, I love my rack. If you’re in or near a city I suggest keeping an eye on Craigslist and ebay (search by distance nearest and lowball ones that have been sitting for months) because it’s not uncommon for nice racks to go real cheap as long as you come get them. I got my rack realllll cheap ($40, 42u, fully enclosed with massive pdu) because it’s a 90s ibm rack and it’s welded steel so it’s like 450lbs. Moving it was a nightmare but it’s real sturdy and I’m never moving it again now that it’s in my basement
For my goals in the short term I have to replace a sas cable that caused a crc error on one drive, it only happened once per smart data but still want to get that done asap. I also have another drive that’s beginning to show some smart issues; it’s on the same sas cable so it may be related because the errors didn’t increase (they all were related to an unclean shutdown, confusing things) but it’s old anyway so better safe than sorry I guess.
Medium term I want to finally upgrade my ups. The one I have now is not a rack mount which is part of what led to the unclean shutdown. It’s also a bit undersized. I have a generator for my house so I don’t need something massive but the one I have is 450va and several years old so with the tired battery I only can get about 5m of runtime. It’s more than enough to cover the transfer from power cutting out to generator power but I want something that’s a bit more reliable in case of generator failure. This is pricey though because my array is pretty huge so it’ll probably be held off unless I find a good deal on a dead one that has cheap batteries available
I also want to put the rack on its own circuit. This is something I should do asap because it’s cheap, just gotta find time and rearrange my panel a bit because it’s pretty full. This would be the other part of the unclean shutdown as the outlet would be in a much better location and I could also install a locking outlet
Would also be nice to pick up a super cheap monitor locally, like something for $15-20 from a pawn shop or Craigslist or something for the rack. Earlier this year I had nginx crash on my server and the webui became inaccessible, I had to drag my nice and kind of large desktop monitor down to the basement to solve the issue, would be nice to just have a shitty small monitor on the rack for that
Speaking of nginx I keep meaning to setup some kind of reverse proxy or mdns for all my dockers so that I can just do whatever.whatever instead ipaddress:3993 which makes my password managers barf but I’ll probably just be lazy and edit my hosts file
Longer term I want to add a secondary low power server that can run something like pfsense to handle my routing, then turn my current wireless routers into access points because they kind of suck as routers.
And of course the array could always be bigger, especially if drive prices fall
I will probably realistically only do the drive and cable replacement, the circuit thing since that’ll be like $40 and a half hour of work, the monitor if I can find one, and maybe the hosts file thing. If I run into cash (unlikely) or a crazy deal (you never know) the ups would be my next priority but there’s a million other things going in life (deductibles just reset for health insurance, hooray)
Nginx is pretty simple to run as a reverse proxy. Caddy is even easier but not as scalable.
HAProxy looks intimidating at first but it’s pretty easy and very scalable and performant. Wendell from Level1Techs has a nice writeup on their forums
Oh, there’s also Nginx Proxy Manager that is very clean and very easy to work and manage with it’s nice web UI
“I’m never moving it again…”. As a larger guy that owns a pickup truck, I wish I had a nickel for everytime I heard that about a big rack I help move. (Or a baby grand piano, pool table, or gun safe) :)
ipvlan / macvlan containers?
For the nginx reverse proxy - that’s how I ran things prior to moving to microk8s. If you want I can dig out some config examples. The trick for me was to set up host based stanzas, then update my internal DNS to have A records for each docker service pointing to the same docker host.
With Kubes + external-dns + nginx ingress, I can just do a deployment/service/ingress and things automatically work now.
To start - moving services from bare metal to rootless Podman containers running via quadlets. It’s something I have had in mind for a while but keep second guessing the distro choice. Long-ish release cadence, systemd-networkd and a recent Podman version in the native repos, well supported, and not Ubuntu.
So far openSUSE Leap seems like the winner. A testing machine is up to install everything, write some deployment scripts, and decide on a storage layout and partitioning scheme.
If anyone has another distro to recommend that checks these boxes let me know!
I like rolling release for the desktop, but only want critical patches in any given month for this server, and a major upgrade no more than every 3-4 years. Or an immutable server distro. But it doesn’t seem like networkd is an option for the ones I’ve looked at (Fedora CoreOS, openSUSE MicroOS), and I am not sure if I want to figure out Ignition/Combustion right now.
Next project - VLANs on Mikrotik.
OP - Navepoint makes good racks for reasonable money. I have a Pro series 9u from them and it went together without any problems. It’s on the wall with a pretty big ups in it.
Thanks for the recommendation!
If I hadn’t been using Unraid for my server I too think I’d be rocking OpenSuse, but probably MicroOS as you mentioned.
Finally get a cheap mini PC so I can stop running my gaming rig 24/7 for jellyfin. Looking to start self hosting few other services if that goes well.
Same mate.
Goals: keep it running
Hardware perspective i need a nas. I got myself some piece of acer oem thats not too shit just need a case and some drives (i dont wanna just make stack of drives on top of the stack of old oems i call a homelab).
Am getting starlink installed cos shitty rural aussie internet is shit. So gonna have to do some fucking around to make that work.
Would like some local media reccommendation algorithm (can probs just write some code to dump jellyfin into openwebui and task an llm).
Gotta set up an image gen ai and hook that up to openwebui.
Gotta set up an email server to make authelia notifications not just dumped to a file.
Ohh and i got literaly no backups of anything (well except my docker composes that are on git).
Other than that we will see what i want.
docker-ify everything, my nginx, nextcloud, pihole, jellyfin, and basically everything else is a nightmare and I can’t even begin to understand how to modify the shit that
2023 me did2023 chatgpt spat out, so having everything in some neat docker composes is gonna help immenslyalso making the Pi that everything’s hosted on boot of an SSD instead of a cheap chinese SD card, but that requires money and I’m all out
I docker’d all of my systems a few years ago, and I’m so glad I did. So much easier to manage, and when I lost a system I was able to get most of my services back up and running with minimal configuration on a VM same day.
As for hardware, you might check and see if you’ve got a local reseller of retired business equipment. Before I moved, I had a place I went to from my work that accepted shit we were getting rid of that disposed of stuff and resold at a bargain the stuff that was still good. I got more than one hp tower from a few years previous that ran (and still runs) like a champ. Felt like night and day when I upgraded to that from my Pi setup, and they were only like $35 each.
the pi’s serving me very well for now, load average at idle 0.01 and when doing stuff it hovers at around 50, temps under 40°C even under load and an extremely low noise level (not to mention the almost non-existent power draw)
if one day I decide to go full homelab with proxmox and stuff i might buy a dedicated tower but I don’t see the appeal atm
- don’t break stuff
- upgrade to microOS from Leap, without violating step 1
- reduce the physical footprint of my server (currently in a massive case, would like to go to mini-ITX)
My city is also planning to roll out fiber, so upgrading my network may become a priority if that happens. My current ISP is limited to 100mbps, but I should be able to get 10gbit once they hook me up (though I’ll probably stop well short of that).
Get a domain and set about moving over to HTTPS with Let’s encrypt and Nginx.
Learn to write an Nginx config. NPM just works so good though.
Fix my permission issues. I have my media zpool on 777 so all the LXCs work and I have to run Libation in a VM as root. I’ve been banging my head against this on and off for a while.
Figure out why paperless isn’t saving to the correct place. Also, figure out where Paperless is saving to.
Containerise Libation.
I give friends and family access to my server via a relay, just a raspberry pi 0 with Tailscale, pihole and nginx on it. I have reasons for going this route. Anyways, get a couple more of those into the wild. Also streamline the process somewhat.
Learn to and create an ACL config for tailscale so I can have services access nothing, users access services, and admins access everything.
Why not caddy?
Momentum really. I’m on NPM now, it works and it’s great. I didn’t put much thought into it. I’m generally happy with npm, it’s mostly just something to learn next and plain nginx made sense.
Check out traefik as an alternative to nginx or npm
