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!
My Homelab Setup
141–150 of 232 posts
Re: My Homelab Setup
#142>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…
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.
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
Re: My Homelab Setup
#143One 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 c…
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.
Re: My Homelab Setup
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you have any family members relying on these services, you have to kill them all every time you reboot your workstation yikes!
Yeah I can't imagine killing my family members every time I'm shutting down my computer
It's better than having to hear them complain every time plex goes down
Re: My Homelab Setup
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It depends on the type of hardware that you use for your server. If it's really server grade you're totally right. For example cheap memory+CPU+MB x99 off AliExpress are cheap but they're not very efficient.
In my case I fell in love with the tiny/mini/micros and have a refurbish Lenovo m710q running 24/7 and only using 5W when idling. I know it doesn't support ECC memory or more than 8 threads, but for my use case is more than enough
Re: My Homelab Setup
#146>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…
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
This is what i do.
Re: My Homelab Setup
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough. How much RAM though?
16GB would be plenty. I've got like a dozen services running on an 8GB i7-4970 and it's only using 5GB of RAM right now.
If you're running ZFS, it's advisable to use more RAM. ZFS is a RAM hog. I'm using 32GB on my home server.
Re: My Homelab Setup
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
>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.
That's exactly what TrueNAS is these days: it's Debian + OpenZFS + a handy web-based UI + some extra NAS-oriented bits. You can roll your own if you want with just Debian and OpenZFS if you don't mind using the command line for everything, or you can try "Cockpit".
The nice thing about TrueNAS is that all the ZFS management stuff is nicely integrated into the UI, which might not be the case with other UIs, and the whole thing is set up out-of-the-box to do ZFS and only ZFS.
Re: My Homelab Setup
#149[dead]
Re: My Homelab Setup
#150Earlier 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 recommend Ente photos, harder to setup but feels much more robust and its end to end encrypted, which I prefer.