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!
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. :)
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…
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.
Backups are key! Need to work on this myself too!
I got no backups ao ur doing better than me. If 1 ssd dies there goes all my data.
I did this recently. Opendrive is free up to 5 gb and works with rclone. All I’m backing up is the config and data needed to recreate my containerized services. I’ve even had to recreate them from the backup, once.
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
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.
“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) :)
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.
get around cgnat finally
New provider, VPS, or CloudFlare tunnels.
Tailscale? 👉👈 🥺
From a hardware perspective I need more storage. Am thinking I’ll probably end up with a second Synology NAS unit before the end of the year with 4 hard drives at whatever a reasonable price vs size point it at the time I do it (likely 12-14Tb drives at this stage). Bought drives 2 at a time last time so I’m running two RAID1 pairs right now on the existing unit - adding 4 new drives at once to the home lab will let me move all that content to the new drives and reformat the existing ones into a RAID5 array and get an extra 12Tb of storage.
The one I already have does support adding the 5 drive expansion bay, but figuring that with a second NAS I can move some of my Docker instances currently running on a dedicated laptop onto the second NAS which takes one computer out of the setup as well.
Maintenance wise I’ve just only done my 2024 maintenance stuff that I do each year. This year it was going through my password vault and making sure everything was synced up, had complex passwords, had two factor enabled where applicable, etc, as well as setting up unique email addresses for every service I’m using (they just forward to the same inbox) to help me track who’s been selling my info. Have already found a local fast food outlet who has from that.
Have also rotated all my SSH keys, made sure they were all upgraded to Ed25519 from RSA, set up unique keys for the three devices I regularly use so I can revoke one individually if required, made sure all my hardware was running the latest updates (my RPi running my Pi-hole instance was still on Buster so I had to get that updated before I could even update Pi-hole), etc.
Also swapped my Mullvad connection on my gateway to use Wireguard instead of OpenVPN since they’re dropping support later this year.
Honestly I’d love to invest in some sort of rack mounting for home, its something I should look into some more, but right now I just have a whole section of the wardrobes in my study for equipment and tech storage. It’s working for now although I worry about it in summer with not a massive amount of heat dissipation in there. This weekend is supposed to be close to 40 degrees Celsius both days 🥵
finish setting it up
I have all the hardware laying around collecting dust
The fun part is putting it together and watching it all work smoothly! Best of luck dude 👍
I loathe to grind all the software setup, it’s so dull, yet I have to concentrate to not fuck anything up.
Just wanted to vent.
Thank you 🫰
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.
Replace proxmox with incus.
I’m on proxmox too and now very curious as to why you want to move to incus.
same
Given the topic, the response and the location I’m going to go with “because it seems neat and could be fun”.
Now, since I now know if it I’m going to give it a crack. 😆
Hardware-wise:
- Reorganize my networking closet and rack up my switches
- Replace my core switch with 10 gbit, connect up 10Gbit fiber to my laptop dock and one of my nodes still on copper
- Add 3 more nodes to my cluster with nvme storage so that I can start an erasure-coding pool in ceph.
Software wise, too many projects to count lol
Replace Blue Iris with Frigate + Coral
Set up Immich with proper backups
Set up Peertube
Increase my storage pool to fit 100% of my local backups.
Nearline my critical backups
Move my remote backups from BackBlaze to synctoy untrusted crypt on a pie at work.
Frigate and a Coral TPU work amazing. I’ve had them and Home Assistant setup for the last year or so and have been quite happy.
I’m honestly very excited I bought the coral about 2 months ago and it’s just been sitting there. I even loaded proxmox on a laptop with a decent GPU. I’m just so sick of alerts every time headlights flash up in my driveway or a cloud goes over…
Hopefully I can finally get the IPv6 stack fully working.
OPNsense works, Proxmox works, LXC works, Docker works but Docker Swarm does not.
Either I move away from Docker Swarm or a miracle happens and they finally fix their IPv6 support in 2025.
As a networking noob: what are the benefits to having/using an IPv6 stack? I realize that eventually we all have to move to IPv6, but any point in being early on it?
IPv6 is pretty much identical to IPv4 in terms of functionality.
The biggest difference is that there is no more need for NAT with IPv6 because of the sheer amount of IPv6 addresses available. Every device in an IPv6 network gets their own public IP.
For example: I get 1 public IPv4 address from my ISP but 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 IPv6 addresses. That’s a number I can’t even pronounce and it’s just for me.
There are a few advantages that this brings:
- Any client in the network can get a fresh IP every day to reduce tracking
- It is pretty much impossible to run a full network scan on this amount of IP addresses
- Every device can expose their own service on their own IP (For example: You can run multiple web servers on the same port without a reverse proxy or multiple people can host their own game server on the same port)
There are some more smaller changes that improve performance compared to IPv4, but it’s minimal.
Well this certainly has me intrigued!
The no NAT thing really messed with my brain and was probably the hardest thing to overcome for me.
I love havingipv6. Hard to learn and had roadblocks but now that it’s set up works fine.
Does it matter no but just nice to know I have it figured out.
I want to replace my single drive Qnap NAS by a diy one. It still works, but I also want to redo my backup process, and it would be a good point to start.
Omg… I have the EXACT same goal. Qnap and make a better offsite backup process… Been procrastinating for years now
I’m thinking a diy NAS running openmediavault.
Currently doing encrypted backups to google storage archive tier. Very cheap to store, expensive to retrieve.
Thinking maybe i can set up a small box at a family members house for nightly backups
