My Homelab Setup • Hacker News Board

Re: My Homelab Setup

#81

Post by hparadiz » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

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.

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.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#82

Post by techcode » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:23 PM UTC

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…

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...

Re: My Homelab Setup

#83

Post by nickorlow » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

benlivengood wrote: post #73

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.

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)

Re: My Homelab Setup

#84

Post by reddalo » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:44 PM UTC

natterangell wrote: post #44

freetonik wrote: post #11

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

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).

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).

Re: My Homelab Setup

#85

Post by sgt » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:47 PM UTC

tclancy wrote: post #76

sgt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No worries Sarge and thanks for keeping the kids alive out there.

It's a pleasure, Tom! May I call you Tom?

Re: My Homelab Setup

#86

Post by ryandrake » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:48 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#87

Post by bluehatbrit » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

reddalo wrote: post #84

natterangell wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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).

Could you elaborate on the issues with their S3 compatible storage? I've been considering it and haven't seen too many issues in my testing, beyond the lack of identity control.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#88

Post by SauntSolaire » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

BitsAndObjects wrote: post #39

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

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.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#89

Post by brownindian » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

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…

Could also use Cloudflare tunnels. That way:

1. your 1password gets a different entry each time for ..

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.

Re: My Homelab Setup

#90

Post by garyfirestorm » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 10:04 PM UTC

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.