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?
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.
No reason you can’t use NixOS in a VM on Proxmox.
My container host OS is another immutable, uCore, which I run in a VM on Proxmox.
Never said you couldn’t I was assuming OP was running VMs inside of Nix
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.
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
Start setting one up.
Have fun!
Same!
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.
I got no backups ao ur doing better than me. If 1 ssd dies there goes all my data.
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…
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.
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.
Buying a 16 TB hard drive for… purposes.
You can say piracy here, it’s a safe space. Or, ya know, porn.
Both tbh.
get around cgnat finally
Tailscale? 👉👈 🥺
That’s what I’m currently using and it doesn’t cut it, especially for streaming movies
Literally just finished configuring headscale on a free (pay as you go) oracle vps because I’m behind cgnat. Getting tailscale on pfsense to connect to a headscale server was a chore but finally got it.
I’m using tailscale now and yeah, their relay servers are very spotty. I do have an ampere free tier just sitting around that i was planning to use as a relay for an overlay network, but that’s all been in the planning phase all year.
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
Do git :)
Dumb question but is there a way to automatically backup my compose files to my local gitea instance?
Can’t you just write them in an IDE and push to your gitea?
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“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) :)
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
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.
Learn how to design an implement effective segmentation for my network, get better with OPNsense, and get my private website up and running
I had a blast learning and configuring vlans for my smart switch and putting all the IOT devices on their own network.
Do you happen to remember what learning resources you used?
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
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.
A relatively newish SBC can run Jellyfin and even do some light transcoding (single stream full HD or 2-3 streams SD).
Any particular spec requirement I would need? There are a lot of them in used market but I am not sure what I need.
Raspberry Pi 4 4GB handled it just fine for me the last couple years.
Same mate.
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.
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.
