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My Homelab Setup

bryananthonio.com

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Re: My Homelab Setup

#121

Post by drnick1 »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #102

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.

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.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#122

Post by nerdsniper »

c-hendricks wrote: post #119
PunchyHamster wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How do I edit the hosts file of an iPhone?

You don't have to if you use mDNS. Or configure the iPhone to use your own self-hosted DNS server which can just be your router/gateway pointed to 9.9.9.9 / 1.1.1.1 / 8.8.8.8 with a few custom entries. You would need to jailbreak your iPhone to edit the hosts file.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#123

Post by photon_collider »

xoa wrote: post #18

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 j…

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.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#124

Post by akersten »

cortesoft wrote: post #91
lloydatkinson wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

It's probably a convenience feature. Tons of sites out there that start on www then bounce you to secure2.bank.com then to auth. and now you're on www2.bank.com and for some inexplicable reason need to type your login again.

Actually it's mostly financial institutions that I've seen this happen with. Have to wonder if they all share the same web auth library that runs on the Z mainframe, or there's some arcane page of the SOC2 guide that mandates a minimum of 3 redirects to confuse the man in the middle.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#125

Post by leptons »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #101
pajamasam wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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 th…

Cheap to buy old hardware, but electricity to run those old rigs isn't really cheap in many areas now. My server is costing me about $100/month in electricity costs.

It does have 16 spinning disks in it, so I accept that I pay for the energy to keep them spinning 24/7, but I like the redundancy of RAID10, and I have two 8-disk arrays in the machine. And a Ryzen-7 5700G, 10gbit NIC, 16 port RAID card, and 96GB of RAM.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#126

Post by Root_Denied »

polairscience wrote: post #66
nsbk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

I'm in the process of moving all my backups to Immich - honestly it's best in class software.

I'm able to set it up so that my SO and I can view all the pictures taken by the other (mostly cute photos of our dog and kid, but makes it easier to share them with others when we don't have to worry about what device they're on), have it set to auto-backup, and routed through my VPS so it's available effectively worldwide.

The only issue that I run into is a recent one, which is hard drive space - I've got it on a NAS/RAID setup with backups sent to another NAS at my parents' place, but it's an expensive drive replacement in current market conditions.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#127

Post by firecall »

xandrius wrote: post #55

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.

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..

Re: My Homelab Setup

#128

Post by mcbuilder »

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.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#129

Post by predkambrij »

linsomniac wrote: post #9

>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 t…

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

Re: My Homelab Setup

#130

Post by tuananh »

*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

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