My Homelab Setup

https://bryananthonio.com/blog/my-homelab-setup/

350 215 5 months ago

kleebeesh• 5 months ago

Neat!

Right now, accessing my apps requires typing in the IP address of my machine (or Tailscale address) together with the app’s port number.

You might try running Nginx as an application, and configure it as a reverse proxy to the other apps. In your router config you can setup foo.home and bar.home to point to the Nginx IP address. And then the Nginx config tells it to redirect foo.home to IP:8080 and bar.home to IP:9090. That's not a thorough explanation but I'm sure you can plug this into an LLM and it'll spell it out for you.

verdverm3• 5 months ago

Caddy is increasingly popular these days too. I use both and cannot decide which I prefer.

victorio• 5 months ago

Caddy's configuration is so simple and straightforward, I love it. For sure a more comfortable experience for simple setups

windexh8er2• 5 months ago

I think most homelabbers default to Caddy and/or Traefik these days. Nginx is still around with projects like NPM (the other NPM), but Caddy and Traefik are far more capable.

DevOpsToolbox did a great video on many of the reasons why Caddy is so great (including performance) [0]. I think the only downside with Caddy right now is still how plugins work. Beyond that, however it's either Caddy or Traefik depending on my use case. Traefik is so easy to plug in and forget about and Caddy just has a ton of flexibility and ease of setup for quick solutions.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Inu5VhrO1rE

Frotag• 5 months ago

IME androids dont respect static routes published by the router. I guess self hosting DNS might be more robust but I usually just settle for bookmarking the ip:port

frumiousirc• 5 months ago

This (reverse proxy) is essentially what "tailscale serve" does.

c-hendricks5• 5 months ago

Also recommending using a DNS server that points `*.yourdomain` do your reverse proxy's IP. That way requests skip going outside your network and helps for ISPs that don't work with "loopback" DNS (quotes because I don't know the proper term)

You can then set your DNS in Tailscale to that machines tailnet IP and access your servers when away without having to open any ports.

And bonus, if it's pihole for dns you now get network-level Adblock both in and outside the home.

mnahkies• 5 months ago

Personally I'm using haproxy for this purpose, with Lego to generate wildcard SSL certs using DNS validation on a public domain, then running coredns configured in the tailnet DNS resolvers to serve A records for internal names on a subdomain of the public one.

I've found this to work quite well, and the SSL whilst somewhat meaningless from a security pov since the traffic was already encrypted by wire guard, makes the web browser happy so still worthwhile.

anon70002• 5 months ago

Or just use Tailscale serve to put the app on a subdomain

pajamasam4• 5 months ago

This worked for me to get subdomains and TLS certificates working on a similar setup: https://blog.mni.li/posts/internal-tls-with-caddy/

ls612• 5 months ago

The part you are leaving out is that you also need to set up something like a pihole (which you can just run in a container on the homelab rather than on a pi) to do the local DNS resolution.

navigate8310• 5 months ago

Why are you using restic, when TrueNAS offers native solutions to backup your data elsewhere?

PunchyHamster5• 5 months ago

exactly because it isn't trueNAS specific I'd imagine

dizhn3• 5 months ago

Encryption, deduplication, snapshots. Although if the poster has a zfs based system elsewhere zfs based backups would be fantastic.

sgt4• 5 months ago

This is extremely light - not a bad setup, but I mean.. it's like 1% of typical Homelabs.

switchbak• 5 months ago

It feels like day 2 after you’ve received the new hard drives. It’s nice, modern enough but still a pretty bog standard home machine, not really “homelab” territory yet.

sgt4• 5 months ago

Exactly. And I don't mind this being on the HN front page, but I'd like to see some proper Homelab setups here. Maybe someone can post the coolest setup they've seen so far?

akerl_4• 5 months ago

Why do we need to gatekeep “homelab”?

Scene_Cast2• 5 months ago

Of typical homelabs that are posted and discussed.

The online activity of the homelab community leans towards those who treat it as an enjoyable hobby as opposed to a pragmatic solution.

I'm on the other side of the spectrum. Devops is (at best) a neutral activity; I personally do it because I strongly dislike companies being able to do a rug-pull. I don't think you'll see setups like mine too often, as there isn't anything to brag about or to show off.

HelloUsername• 5 months ago

This is extremely light

I'm curious about its power consumption on idle, average use, and peak.

skyberrys• 5 months ago

I too was wondering what made this a homelab. I appreciate the setup, but from the word lab I was expecting at least an oscilloscope. That being said it has cool features I hadn't known about like the image storing system and at home LLM support.

tclancy5• 5 months ago

Deeply suspect it has to do with being in the authors home.

tclancy5• 5 months ago

Mother of God, why make this comment? It’s the poster’s setup and they are happy with it. What possible value could denigrating it do? The ol’ ball coach breakin’ em down to build em up shtick is gone and I don’t miss it.

sgt4• 5 months ago

Didn't mean it that way - and for that I apologize. I was just expecting a lot more since it was on the front page.

linsomniac• 5 months ago

Because all of my services share the same IP address, my password manager has trouble distinguishing which login to use for each one.

In Bitwarden they allow you to configure the matching algorithm, and switching from the default to "starts with" is what I do when I find that it is matching the wrong entries. So for this case just make sure that the URL for the service includes the port number and switch all items that are matching to "starts with". Though it does pop up a big scary "you probably didn't mean to do this" warning when you switch to "starts with"; would be nice to be able to turn that off.

dewey2• 5 months ago

This is always annoying me with 1Password, before that I just always added subdomains but now I'm usually hosting everything behind Tailscale which makes this problem even worse as the differentiation is only the port.

wrxd• 5 months ago

You can still have subdomains with Tailscale. Point them at the tailscale IP address and run a reverse proxy in front of your services

domh2• 5 months ago

You can use tailscale services to do this now:

https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-services

Then you can access stuff on your tailnet by going to http://service instead of http://ip:port

It works well! Only thing missing now is TLS

zackify• 5 months ago

tailscale serve 4000 --BG

Problem solved ;)

miloschwartz3• 5 months ago

Pangolin handles this nicely. You can define alias addresses for internal resources and keep the fully private and off the public internet. Also based on WireGuard like Tailscale.

altano2• 5 months ago

In the 1Password entry go to the "website" item. To right right there's an "autofill behavior" button. Change it to "Only fill on this exact host" and it will no longer show up unless the full host matches exactly

lloydatkinson• 5 months ago

I wonder why each service doesn’t have a different subdomain.

tylerflick• 5 months ago

This is the way. You can even do it with mDNS.

cortesoft• 5 months ago

That's what I do, but you still have to change the default Bitwarden behavior to match on host rather than base domain.

Matching on base domain as the default was surprising to me when I started using Bitwarden... treating subdomains as the same seems dangerous.

photon_collider2• 5 months ago

Ah nice! Didn’t know that. I’ll try that out next time.

techcode• 5 months ago

Setup AdGuard-Home for both blocking ads and internal/split DNS, plus Caddy or another reverse proxy and buy (or recycle/reuse) a domain name so you can get SSL certificates through LetsEncrypt.

You don't need to have any real/public DNS records on that domain, just own the domain so LetsEncrypt can verify and give you SSL certificate(s).

You setup local DNS rewrites in AdGuard - and point all the services/subdomains to your home servers IP, Caddy (or similar) on that server points it to the correct port/container.

With TailScale or similar - you can also configure that all TailScale clients use your AdGuard as DNS - so this can work even outside your home.

Thats how I have e.g.: https://portainer.myhome.top https://jellyfin.myhome.top ...etc...

brownindian• 5 months ago

Could also use Cloudflare tunnels. That way:

1. your 1password gets a different entry each time for <service>.<yourdomain>.<tld>

2. you get https for free

3. Remote access without Tailscale.

4. Put Cloudflare Access in front of the tunnel, now you have a proper auth via Google or Github.

mvdtnz• 5 months ago

Yeesh, the last thing I want is remote access to my homelab.

QGQBGdeZREunxLe• 5 months ago

Tunnels go through Cloudflare infrastructure so are subject to bandwidth limits (100MB upload). Streaming Plex over a tunnel is against their ToS.

lukevp• 5 months ago

You can also use cloudflare to create a dns record for each local service (pointed to the local IP) and just mark it as not proxied, then use Wireguard or Tailscale on your router to get VPN access to your whole network. If you set up a reverse proxy like nginx proxy manager, you can easily issue a wildcard cert using DNS validation from your NAS using ACME (LetsEncrypt). This is what I do, and I set my phone to use Wireguard with automatic VPN activation when off my home WiFi network. Then you’re not limited by CF Tunnel’s rules like the upload limits or not being able to use Plex.

gerdesj• 5 months ago

"Because all of my services share the same IP address"

DNS. SNI. RLY?

sv0• 5 months ago

That's a bit weird to read for me as well. DNS and local DNS were the first services I've been self-hosting since 2005.

On Debian/Ubuntu, hosting local DNS service is easy as `apt-get install dnsmasq` and putting a few lines into `/etc/dnsmasq.conf`.

tbyehl• 5 months ago

Not to diminish having names for everything but that just shifts the Bitwarden problem to "All of my services share the same base domain."

PunchyHamster5• 5 months ago

Just giving them hostnames is easier.

In homelab space you can also make wildcard DNS pretty easily in dnsmasq, assuming you also "own" your router. If not, hosts file works well enough.

There is also option of using mdns for same reason but more setup

c-hendricks5• 5 months ago

How do I edit the hosts file of an iPhone?

tehlike• 5 months ago

This is what i do.

overfeed• 5 months ago

Just giving them hostnames is easier

Bitwarden annoyingly ignores subdomains by default. Enabling per-sudomain credential matching is a global toggle, which breaks autocomplete on other online service that allow you to login across multiple subdomains.

predkambrij3• 5 months ago

One cool trick is having (public) subdomains pointing to the tailscale IP.

timwis• 5 months ago

This is what I do. Works great! And my caddy setup uses the DNS mode to provision TLS certs (using my domain provider's caddy plugin).

m463• 5 months ago

or just use the same password for everything. ;)

ozim• 5 months ago

If it is like 12 characters non dictionary and PW you use only in your homelab - seems like perfectly fine.

If you expose something by mistake still should be fine.

Big problem with PW reuse is using the same for very different systems that have different operators who you cannot trust about not keeping your PW in plaintext or getting hacked.

harrygeez• 5 months ago

not really a solution (as others have pointed out already) but it also tells me you are missing a central identity provider (think Microsoft account login). You can try deploying Kanidm for a really simple and lightweight one :)

dpoloncsak• 5 months ago

For my homelab, I setup a Raspberry Pi running PiHole. PiHole includes the ability to set local DNS records if you use it as your DNS resolver.

Then, I use Tailscale to connect everything together. Tailscale lets you use a custom DNS, which gets pointed to the PiHole. Phone blocks ads even when im away from the house, and I can even hit any services or projects without exposing them to the general internet.

Then I setup NGINX reverse proxy but that might not be necessary honestly

freetonik• 5 months ago

The author uses Restic + Backblaze B2 storage. I was recently setting up backups for my homebase as well, and went with Restic + BorgBase [0]. Not affiliated, just wanted to share that I think they have a nice service with a straight-forward pricing model. They are the company behind excellent Pikapods [1], which may be interesting to the homelab crowd.

[0] https://www.borgbase.com

[1] https://www.pikapods.com

natterangell• 5 months ago

I also use backrest/restic on my NAS, but I went with a Hetzner StorageBox instead, a little cheaper for 1TB (I pay 5USD monthly including VAT, billed monthly too).

reddalo2• 5 months ago

Me too, I highly recommend Hetzner Storage Box. It's cheap, and it works great (unlike their S3-compatible storage, which has been a huge fiasco since they launched it).

acidburnNSA2• 5 months ago

I have something like this, in the same case. I have beefier specs b/c I use it as a daily workstation in addition to running all my stuff.

* nginx with letsencrypt wildcard so I have lots of subdomains

* No tailscale, just pure wireguard between a few family houses and for remote access

* Jellyfin for movies and TV, serving to my Samsung TV via the Tizen jellyfin app

* Mopidy holding my music collection, serving to my home stereo and numerous other speakers around the house via snapcast (raspberry pi 3 as the client)

* Just using ubuntu as the os with ZFS mirroring for NAS, serving over samba and NFS

* Home assistant for home automation, with Zigbee and Z-wave dongles

* Frigate as my NVR, recording from my security cams, doing local object detection, and sending out alerts via Home Assistant

* Forgejo for my personal repository host

* tar1090 hooked to a SDR for local airplane tracking (antenna in attic)

This all pairs nicely with my two openwrt routers, one being the main one and a dumb AP, connected via hardwire trunk line with a bunch of VLANs.

Other things in the house include an iotawatt whole-house energy monitor, a bunch of ESPs running holiday light strips, indoor and outdoor homebrew weather stations with laser particulate sensors and CO2 monitors (alongside the usual sensors), a water-main cutoff (zwave), smart bulbs, door sensors, motion sensors, sirens/doorbells, and a thing that listens for my fire alarm and sends alerts. Oh and I just flashed the pura scent diffuser my wife bought and lobotomized it so it can't talk to the cloud anymore, but I can still automate it.

I love it and have tons of fun fiddling with things.

pajamasam4• 5 months ago

Impressive that all that can run on one machine. Mind sharing the specs?

cyberpunk2• 5 months ago

You could easily run all of that on a rpi…

drnick14• 5 months ago

Not impressive at all. I run just about as many services, plus several game servers, on a Ryzen 5, and most of the time CPU usage is in the low single digits. Most stuff is idle most of the time. Something like a Home Assistant instance used by a single household is basically costless to run in terms of CPU.

c-hendricks5• 5 months ago

I run similar (gitea, scrypted+ffmpeg instead of frigate, plex instead of jellyfin) plus some Minecraft servers, *arr stack, notes, dns, and my VM for development.

It's an i7-4790k from 12 years ago, it barely breaks a sweat most hours of the day.

It's not really that impressive, or (not to be a jerk) you've overestimated how expensive these services are to run.

TacticalCoder• 5 months ago

Impressive that all that can run on one machine. Mind sharing the specs?

Not GP but I have lots of fun running VMs and lots of containers on an old HP Z440 workstation from 2014 or so. This thing has 64 GB of ECC RAM and costs next to nothing (a bit more now with RAM that went up). Thing is: it doesn't need to be on 24/7. I only power it up when I first need it during the day. 14 cores Xeon for lots of fun.

Only thing I haven't moved to it yet is Plex, which still runs on a very old HP Elitedesk NUC. Dunno if Plex (and/or Jellyfin) would work fine on an old Xeon: but I'll be trying soon.

Before that I had my VMs and containers on a core i7-6700K from 2015 IIRC. But at some point I just wanted ECC RAM so I bought a used Xeon workstation.

As someone commented: most services simply do not need that beefy of a machine. Especially not when you're strangled by a 1 Gbit/s Internet connection to the outside world anyway.

For compilation and overall raw power, my daily workstation is a more powerful machine. But for a homelab: old hardware is totally fine (especially if it's not on 24/7 and I really don't need access to my stuff when I sleep).

acidburnNSA2• 5 months ago

Ryzen 5950x cpu, 64 gb ecc ram, dual 16 tb drives for zfs, Nvidia 5070 gpu.

Way way overspeced for what I listed, but I use it for lots of video processing, numerical simulations, and some local AI too.

I have a similar subset of this stuff running at my mom's house on a 16 GB ram Beelink minicomputer. With openvino frigate can still do fully local object detection on the security case, whish is sweet.

wbjacks• 5 months ago

Have you tried using snapcast to broadcast sound from your Samsung tv? I gave it a shot and could never get past the latency causing unacceptable A/V delay, did you have any luck?

VladVladikoff• 5 months ago

For anyone considering this, it's not a good plan to do it this way, if you have any family members relying on these services, you have to kill them all every time you reboot your workstation. It's really not great to mix destop and server like this. (speaking from experiance and I really need to get a separate box setup for this self hosted stuff)

zem• 5 months ago

if you have any family members relying on these services, you have to kill them all every time you reboot your workstation

yikes!

bjackman2• 5 months ago

You are always gonna have some downtime in a homelab setup I think. Unless you go all in with k8s I think the best you can do is "system reboots at 4AM, hopefully all the users are asleep".

(Probably a lot of the services I run don't even really support HA properly in a k8s system with replicas. E.g. taking global exclusive DB locks for the lifetime of their process)

ryukoposting2• 5 months ago

It's also worth noting you don't need sophisticated hardware to run anything listed in the parent comment. 8GB of RAM and a Celeron would be adequate. More RAM might be nice if you use the NAS a lot.

xoa2• 5 months ago

I'll admit I've still stuck with the original FreeBSD based TrueNAS, and still am kinda bummed they swapped it. So it's interesting to see a direct example of someone for whom the new Linux based version is clearly superior. I'm long since far, far more at the "self-hosted" vs "homelab" end of the spectrum at this point, and in turn have ended up splitting my roles back out again more vs all-in-one boxes. My NAS is just a NAS, my virtualization is done via proxmox on separate hardware with storage backing to the NAS via iSCSI, and I've got a third box for OPNsense to handle the routing functions. When I first compared, the new TrueNAS was slower (presumably that is at parity or better now?) and missing certain things of the old one, but already was much easier to have Synology or Docker style or the like "apps" AIO. That didn't interest me because I didn't want my NAS to have any duty but being a NAS, but I can see how it'd be far more friendly to someone getting going, or many small business setups. A sort of better truly open and supported "open Synology" (as opposed the xpenology project).

Clearly it's worked for them here, and I'm happy to see it. Maybe the bug will truly bite them but there's so much incredibly capable hardware now available for a song and it's great to see anyone new experiment with bringing stuff back out of centralized providers in an appropriately judicious way.

Edit: I'll add as well, that this is one of those happy things that can build on itself. As you develop infrastructure, the marginal cost of doing new things drops. Like, if you already have a cheap managed switch setup and your own router setup whatever it is, now when you do something like the author describes you can give all your services IPs and DNS and so on, reverse proxy, put different things on their own VLANs and start doing network isolation that way, etc for "free". The bar of giving something new a shot drops. So I don't think there is any wrong way to get into it, it's all helpful. And if you don't have previous ops or old sysadmin experience or the like then various snags you solve along the way all build knowledge and skills to solve new problems that arise.

lostlogin3• 5 months ago

splitting my roles back out again more

The fiasco you can cause when you try fix, update, change etc makes this my favourite too.

Household life is generally in some form of ‘relax’ mode in evening and at weekends. Having no internet or movies or whatever is poorly tolerated.

I wish Apple was even slightly supportive of servers and Linux as the mini is such a wicked little box. I went to it to save power. Just checked - it averaged 4.7w over the past 30 days. It runs Ubuntu server in UTM which notably raises power usage but it has the advantage that Docker desktop isn’t there.

xoa2• 5 months ago

The fiasco you can cause when you try fix, update, change etc makes this my favourite too.

I think some of the difference between "self-hosted" vs "homelab" is in the answer to the question of "What happens if this breaks end of the day Friday?" An answer of "oh merde of le fan, immediate evening/weekend plans are now hosed" is on the self-hosted end of the spectrum, whereas "eh, I'll poke at it on Sunday when it's supposed to be raining or sometime next week, maybe" is on the other end. Does that make sense? There are a few pretty different ways to approach making your setup reliable/redundant but I think throwing more metal at the problem features in all of them one way or another. Plus if someone moves up the stack it can simply be a lot more efficient and performant, the sort of hardware suited for one role isn't necessarily as well suited for another and trying to cram too much into one box may result in someone worse AND more expensive then breaking out a few roles.

But probably a lot of people who ended up doing more hosting started pretty simple, dipping their toes in the water, seeing how it worked out and building confidence. And having everything virtualized on a single box is a pretty easy and highly flexible way get going and experiment. Also if it's on a ZFS backing makes "reset/rollback world" quite straight forward with minimal understanding given you can just use the same snapshot mechanism for that as you do for all other data. Issues with circular dependencies and the like or what happens if things go down when it's not convenient for you to be around in person don't really matter that much. I think anything that lowers the barrier to entry is good.

Of course, someone can have some of each too! Or be somewhere along the spectrum, not at one end or another.

PunchyHamster5• 5 months ago

There was just not a good reason to stay with BSD, especially with NAS -> homeserver evolution.

Really, we should rename that kind of devices to HSSS (Home Service Storage Server)

vermaden• 5 months ago

I also regret that change.

Big downgrade after moving to Linux:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/truenas-core-versu...

ryandrake• 5 months ago

One of the most helpful realizations I had as I played around with self-hosting at home is that there is nothing magical about a NAS. You don't need special NAS software. You generally don't need wild filesystems, or containers or VMs or this-manager or that-webui. Most people just need Linux and NFS. Or Linux and SMB. And that's kind of it. The more layers running, the more that can fail.

Just like you don't really need the official Pi-hole software. It's a wrapper around dnsmasq, so you really just need dnsmasq.

A habit of boiling your application down to the most basic needs is going to let you run a lot more on your lab and do so a lot more reliably.

globular-toast2• 5 months ago

Same with a router. Any Linux box with a couple of (decent) NICs is a powerful router. You just need to configure it.

But for my own sanity I prefer out of the box solutions for things like my router and NAS. Learning is great but sometimes you really just need something to work right now!

rpcope1• 5 months ago

Kind of expanding on this, it feels like a huge chunk of specialized operating systems are just someone just putting their own skin over Debian. The vast majority of services and tools they wrap aren't any more complicated than the wrapper.

Hardware is kind of the same deal; you can buy weird specialty "NAS hardware" but it doesn't do well with anything offbeat, or you can buy some Supermicro or Dell kit that's used and get the freedom to pick the right hardware for the job, like an actual SAS controller.

globular-toast2• 5 months ago

I'm similar to you[0]. I still run FreeBSD TrueNAS, and it's just a NAS. Although I do run the occasional VM on it as the box is fairly overprovisioned. I run all my other stuff on an xcp-ng box. I'm a little more homelab-y as I do run stuff on a fairly pointless kubernetes cluster, but it's for learning purposes.

I really prefer storage just being storage. For security it makes a lot of sense. Stuff on my network can only access storage via NFS. That means if I were to get malware on my network and it corrupted data (like ransomware), it won't be able to touch the ZFS snapshots I make every hour. I know TrueNAS is well designed and they are using Docker etc, but it still makes me nervous.

I guess when I finally have to replace my NAS I'll have to go Linux, but it'll still be just a NAS for me.

[0] https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/homelab-2025/

photon_collider2• 5 months ago

Fair point! When I first started on this I went down a deep rabbit hole exploring all the ways I could set this up. Ultimately, I decided to start simple with hardware that I had laying around.

I definitely will want to have a dedicated NAS machine and a separate server for compute in the future. Think I'll look more into this once RAM prices come back to normal.

hk13372• 5 months ago

This is a lot of my similar setup in hardware. I just repurposed a PC I was using for windows that I barely used anyways. I would like to move that to a Framework Desktop mounted in my mini rack at some point though.

I ended up making my own dashboard app, not as detailed as Scrutiny because I just wanted a central place that linked to all my internal apps so I didn't have to remember them all and have a simple status check. I made my own in Go though because main ones I found were NodeJS and were huge resource hogs.

BitsAndObjects2• 5 months ago

Have a look at Headscale to avoid the cost of Tailscale for small home setups.

drnick14• 5 months ago

This, or simply expose a VPN (Wireguard) port on a public IP. I don't see why you need to involve any third parties in such a setup.

BitsAndObjects2• 5 months ago

For a single machine, yeah Wireguard is fine. For my multi-user multi-machine many-service home lab, it’s quite helpful to have the extra small features that Headscale offers (and some it exposes in a more convenient way).

Edit: Tailscale has a fairly frank page on Wireguard vs Tailscale with suggestions on when to use which: https://tailscale.com/compare/wireguard

SauntSolaire• 5 months ago

I believe Tailscale is free to use for small home setups. It's limited to 3 users and 100 devices which has been plenty for my homelab setup.

miloschwartz3• 5 months ago

Pangolin is also a good choice. Can be fully self-hosted. Also based on WireGuard.

Handles both browser-based reverse proxy access and client-based P2P connections like a VPN.

xandrius• 5 months ago

One thing to consider before doing the same, a computer done for homelab has a much lower consumption.

The setup mentioned in the article has an avg 600 kWh/year as opposed to a pretty solid HP EliteDesk (my own homelab) which uses 100 kWh/year. Sure you don't get a GPU but for what it is used for, you might as well use a laptop for that.

hparadiz• 5 months ago

I've been thinking of tearing down my old gaming desktop (same as OP) and using a 2014 Macbook Pro instead for exactly this reason.

firecall2• 5 months ago

One reason to repurpose desktops is that you get a full ATX Motherboard with SATA ports!

If you are doing a DIY NAS with HDDs then you want real SATA ports. Or a well supported PCI card with SATA Ports, which you cant sensibly connect to a Laptop or micro PC. Sure, you might be able to use Thunderbolt to reliably hook up an external PCI chassis, but then you might as well buy a NAS at that point or use a full tower case with an ATX mobo!

Using an older Gaming PC you already have is actually a very good option for TrueNAS or OMV.

I took an older 10th Gen Intel Gaming PC we had, sold the core i9 CPU, and replaced it with an i7-10700T I found used on eBay.

I'm finding this setup to be better for my needs than various ex-lease Dell Micro PCs I've used in the past, mainly because of the reliability of the SATA ports.

I've found quality external Samsung T5 SSDs to be very reliable over USB with TrueNAS. But HDDs are a nightmare over USB for a NAS, in my experience.

I was hoping this might be the year that I can finally get rid of the spinning rust. But looks like AI data centres had other ideas! :-)

However, I will say that if you just want to run some virtualized Linux servers or similar, then ex-lease micro PCs are a fantastic deal and can be fun to setup and learn Proxmox and Truenas etc..

bpye• 5 months ago

You can definitely get PCIe on some micro PCs. I have a Lenovo m920q that I use with a Mellanox NIC as my router.

You could certainly install a SAS or SATA controller, the issue would be having somewhere to mount the drives, and a way to power them. External SAS enclosures are not cheap.

sambf• 5 months ago

M.2 SATA cards are also a thing, I repurposed a NUC in a SuperMicro (SYS-521R-T) mini tower server with 4 drives and it works great.

noname120• 5 months ago

Mac Mini M1 running Asahi Linux is half of that: 65-70 kWh/year

predkambrij3• 5 months ago

I have chromebox (with 32GB DDR4) that idle at 4W, but after adding couple nvme drives it doubled it's power consumption. Having full ATX mobo is cool (flexibility), with BIOS settings, powertop, and some other settings can also idle at quite low power. I have i7-7700K that idle at 18W. With combination of wake-on-lan and similar you can have a monster but won't empty your wallet.

Havoc• 5 months ago

Minipcs are nice but they’re not really like for like comparable.

A good AM4 board can do 7 nvme, 8 sata and ecc ram.

polairscience2• 5 months ago

A lot of people are talking about their backup storage solutions in here, but it's mostly about corporate cloud providers. I'm curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and using off-prem storage at a friend's house.

Which is to say, hardware is cheap, software is open, and privacy is very hard to come by. Thus I've been thinking I'd like to not use cloud providers and just keep a duplicate system at a friends, and then of course return the favor. This adds a lot of privacy and quite a bit of redundancy. With the rise of wireguard (and tailscale I suppose), keeping things connected and private has never been easier.

I know that leaning on social relationships is never a hot trend in tech circles but is anyone else considering doing this? Anyone done it? I've never seen it talked about around here.

nine_k• 5 months ago

hardware is cheap

Hardware was cheap a year ago. Whoever managed to build their boxes full of cheap RAM and HDDs, great, they did the right thing. It will be some time until such an opportunity presents itself again.

nsbk• 5 months ago

My off-prem backups are in a Tailscale connected NAS at my parent's house. I'm in the process of talking a friend into having Tailscale configured to host more off-prem backups at his place as well. I'm moving out of iCloud for photo library management and into Immich. I really don't want to lose my photos and videos hence the off-prem backups. Tailscale has been a blessing for this kind of use case

polairscience2• 5 months ago

Oooo. That's the other thing I need to figure out, because it's 90% for my photography. How have you liked immich? Have you tried any other options?

mtsolitary• 5 months ago

I get 3-2-1 backups with no "big cloud" dependency using - My Mac - My NAS (RAID1) using Syncthing - Incremental borg backups to rsync.net (geo-redundant plan) with a cron job.

Evan-Purkhiser• 5 months ago

I do something like this! I’m based in NY but my dad’s in LA. I put together an rpi5 + 5xSATA hat with 3 10TB WD red drives using zraid1 (managed to pick these up over the holidays before prices started going up, $160 per drive!). 3D printed the case and got it running a diskless alpine image with tailscale and zrepl for ZFS snapshot replication. Just left it running in a corner at his place and told him not to touch it heh

Whole thing cost around $500. Before that I was paying ~$35 a month for a Google workspace with 5TB of drive space. At one point in the past it was “unlimited” space for $15 a month. Figure the whole thing will pay for itself in the next couple of years.

Actually just finished the initial replication of my 10TB pool. I ran into a gnarly situation where zrepl blew away the initial snapshot on the source pool just after it finished syncing, and I ended up having to patch in a new fake “matching” snapshot. I had claude write up a post here, if you’ll excuse the completely AI generated “blog post”, it came up with a pretty good solution https://gist.github.com/evanpurkhiser/7663b7cabf82e6483d2d29...

Jedd• 5 months ago

Yes, absolutely. I move between two sites, and also run some gear at my sibling's home, so I have the 3 separate sites thing sorted. ECC + RAID1 + borg at each site gives archival capability on top of standard backup.

Syncthing has the 'untrusted peer' feature, which I've only used once, accidentally, but I believe provides an elegant way of providing some disk for a friend while maintaining privacy of the content.

bluedino• 5 months ago

I'm curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and using off-prem storage at a friend's house.

Have been doing this for 25 years.

If you have asymmetrical connections it's easiest to do the initial backup locally and then take your drive(s) to your friends house and then just sync/update.

ritcgab• 5 months ago

Hard pass whenever you host long-term storage without ECC memory.

benlivengood2• 5 months ago

I've started building a kubernetes cluster (Talos Linux) across town with wireguard between various houses. ZFS boxes for persistent volumes (democratic-csi) in each "zone" with cross-site snapshot replication and Gateway (Traefik) running at each site behind the ISP. CrunchyPGO allows separate StorageClasses to easily split the leader/followers up.

nickorlow2• 5 months ago

Have had issues w/ doing k8s over residential wan once I had enough hosts in my cluster

(though they were halfway across the US from each other, and not town)

benlivengood2• 5 months ago

So far everything is under 15ms apart, but it is a small number of nodes so far. Did you mostly have trouble with etcd?

gehsty• 5 months ago

I’m using a refurbed m4 Mac mini, connected to a unifi nas pro 8, super fun and straightforward. Feels like I only have to do the tinkering I want to do.

garyfirestorm• 5 months ago

you can use https://nginxproxymanager.com/ to manage various services on your homelab. it works flawlessly with Tailscale - I can connect to my tailnet and simply type http://service.mylocaldomain to open the service. you will also need adguard -> adguard dns rewrite -> *.mylocaldomain forwards to the NPM instance and NPM instance has all the information of which IP:PORT has which service Also tailscale DNS should be configured to use adguard -> you can turnoff adblock features if it interferes with any of your stuff.

I would also suggest to use two instances of adguards - one as backup two instances of NPM.

ivanjermakov• 5 months ago

I never understood using a NAS OS and hosting non-NAS services there, it feels upside down. I would rather have a general purpose server OS with running NAS services. Same applies to Proxmox.

denkmoon• 5 months ago

Proxmox is just Debian with a qemu and lxc webui. You can do anything with it

drnick14• 5 months ago

Agreed, I just don't see the point for a "homelab." Unlike many, I like very straightforward setups based on a regular distro like Debian. I also run many services bare metal. This includes nginx, email stack, DNS server, game servers, etc. I use use virtualization/containers for things that I treat as an appliance. This includes Home Assistance, Nextcloud, Matrix, Jellyfin, among others.

buybackoff• 5 months ago

TrueNAS works perfectly as a VM eg on Proxmox with passing through a SATA controller from the motherboard. It may not work always with bad IOMMU groups, but I have this on an old Xeon Precision Tower 3420 and not so old Asus Z690 motherboard. NVMe passthrough should be straightforward as well. No need for LSIs or cheap PCI-to-SATA cards if the number of existing physical slots is enough. And as far as TrueNAS is concerned, it's baremetal disk access. Even the latest TrueNAS is not in the same league as Proxmox for managing VMs/containers, not even close.

sbinnee• 5 months ago

I learned about Mealie.io, thanks.

mcbuilder• 5 months ago

I did the exact same thing except a virtualized opensense router and bare metal kubernetes on one host. The kubernetes broke and I downgraded from 32GB of RAM to 16GB . I actually may revisit the setup since opensense FRR and Cilium BGP to peer your cluster and home LAN is actually a really seamless way to self host things in kubernetes. Maybe there are other ways, maybe there is something simpler, but a homelab is about fun more than pure function.

tuananh• 5 months ago

*most* of the homelab setup doesn't have much load so it's mostly matter of ram available and then power consumption.

many people with setup like this probably needs maybe a 4 cores low powered machine with idle consumption at ~5-10w

Semaphor• 5 months ago

Yeah, this is the AI tax. I have several times as many services (28) on a vastly smaller machine (N100 fanless), but besides some very light AI for image detection which runs on CPU, I have no AI there, so I don’t need a desktop PC.

buckle8017• 5 months ago

Get yourself a custom domain and just use subdomains. Nothing says a public dns server has to return public ips. Bonus you can get https certs with certbot and dns challenge.

Prabhapa• 5 months ago

use cloudflare & cloudflare tunnels for exposing your apps over internet via custom domains. Its free of costs. Tailscale only allows 3 devices i suppose. If we have more devices to be able to connect to , then cloudflare is the best .

tgrowazay• 5 months ago

Tailscale is free for up to 3 users with up to 100 devices

Pooge2• 5 months ago

use cloudflare

Please don't

seriocomic• 5 months ago

With AI/LLM assistants the barrier to setting up and running a homelab is so much lower - in the past 6 months I've had Claude help me completely reconfigure the (now) 5 RPis that were sitting around severely underutilized, I have 3 running Docker, some split between home stuff, production testing and a separate management layer (along with backups that were just in the too hard basket previously). Not to forget all the documentation that goes with it. Fun times!

luzionlighting• 5 months ago

Clean setup. It's interesting how much attention people give to cable management and layout in tech setups.

In architectural lighting projects we often think in a similar way about fixture placement, wiring access and maintenance because poor planning becomes very visible once a space is finished.

izacus3• 5 months ago

Folks that use restic - how does it handle laptop backups?

That is - handling laptop going to sleep during backup, laptop being on only for shorter periods of time, etc.?

Because I had issues with backup tooling which wouldn't resume if it got interrupted and expected for the machine to always run at certain hour of the day. I had examples where laptops wouldn't backup for months because they were only on for a short 30-60min bursts at the time and the backup tools couldn't handle piece-meal resume.

How does restic handle that?

dizhn3• 5 months ago

https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html

It will resume from where it got interrupted. The only exception is the initial backup where it doesn't have a snapshot yet.

calcifer2• 5 months ago

I invoke backups from a systemd timer. If the schedule is missed (due to sleep, power off etc.) it runs it at the next earliest opportunity.

izacus3• 5 months ago

How does it handle restart after the machine wakes up again?

predkambrij3• 5 months ago

/etc/anacrontab can solve your use case.

ErneX• 5 months ago

I run (among many other VMs) TrueNAS on a VM of an xcp-ng host (Supermicro board with a Xeon and ECC ram). Passing a dedicated SAS controller to it. Before that I was using esxi but migrated all my VMs and hosts to xcp-ng. TrueNAS has been pretty good so far, been running this for many years already.

I also have another xcp-ng host for other VMs running on a Dell OptiPlex Micro.

OP should configure DNS locally and reverse proxy each service, I use bind 9 and nginx for that.

succo• 5 months ago

For remote acces I use NetBird, I think is the best and secure option to not expose stuff directly on the web and put all your resources under a vpn. Is super easy to setup and it supports also sso with 2fa

kelvinjps10• 5 months ago

I decided that instead of having to deal with self hosting or cloud solutions to just use local apps and sync them. Syncing Syncthing manages the syncing Passwords Keepassxc for desktop Keepassdx Mobile Note taking and documents Obsidian Neovim and PAndoc doc Photos Native gallery apps Mpv I might do a post about it

ryukoposting2• 5 months ago

Syncthing is the way, especially for OP's photography. My film scans spit out TIF files that can be north of 100MB. Editing those files on a network share is unpleasant. But Syncthing keeps local copies of the files, so editing a photo inside a Synthing folder is like editing a normal file on your computer - because it is.

mattschaller• 5 months ago

Add an *arr stack to that bad boy.

monkaiju• 5 months ago

I ran TrueNAS for years but now that I've discovered immutable OSes, and uCore specifically, I'm never going back!

Sauce: https://github.com/ublue-os/ucore

hazrmard• 5 months ago

I should read up on Tailscale more. I have been using ddclient[1] or the router's built-in dynamic DNS[2] to set up my servers / homelab. This leaves the endpoints exposed to the public internet, as the author says.

    [1]: https://github.com/ddclient/ddclient  
    [2]: https://kb.netgear.com/1058/What-is-Dynamic-DNS-DDNS

canbus• 4 months ago

i have similar on an old dell optiplex, which works really well. I've got lots of raw files in a zfs pool, but they aren't currently backed up anywhere else. any suggestions for cloud storage which works well with rsync?

My Homelab Setup

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