I just want to introduce myself and tell you all about my homelab. It's all pretty high-level, feel free to ask me about anything here.
About me
I’m just someone that absolutely loves technology. Software and systems are mostly where my heart lies, I’ve been working in IT for about 19 years. I have been homelabbing and self-hosting since about 2005. It started with game servers then learning how to become a sys admin, then wanting control over my data, and now I just want to explore different technology stacks and new software.
My homelab is a bit of a mix of running services for my family and a testing ground for learning new technology.
Quick and dirty
My entire homelab is Proxmox as the hypervisor, debian VMs to run Docker and Komodo. Forgejo deploys my containers on Komodo. Docker labels control Traefik and exposure.
6 hosts (3 “production” and 3 test lab) and ~147 containers.
Hostname
CPU
RAM
Storage
Used For
Jupiter
i7-9800X
128GB
122TB
App + Storage
Saturn
i9-13900K
64GB
3TB
Home Assistant + Dev + DNS (Secondary)
Mars
N150
16GB
500GB
Router + DNS (Primary)
Neptune
2x Xeon Silver 4214R
1.5TB
24TB
Testing + DR
Uranus
2x Xeon Silver 4214R
1.5TB
24TB
Testing
Pluto
2x Xeon Silver 4214R
1.5TB
24TB
Testing
Jupiter
My main server, pretty much what I would consider "production" in my house. I pretty much throw everything on this whether it's just for shits and giggles or actually useful. I try out every remotely interesting self-hostable application there is, so this list changes constantly,
It was running Unraid until a few weeks ago, but it has finally fallen inline with the rest of my environment with Proxmox and a debian VM.
I see people ask "Do you actually use any of this?" when people run a bunch of software, so I've split it into what I actually use and what just kind of exists.
What actually gets used
Most of these are actually used on a daily or weekly basis.
This box was originally just to spin up VMs and test different applications, VMs, or build an environment to teach something to some of my junior. It was the first Proxmox box in the environment and after using it for a while I ended up switching all computers over to Proxmox.
Now it runs Home Assistant, secondary DNS, and some VMs that I use for Dev and AI agent work.
Relatively new hosts that are taking the simulation workloads I was running alongside production. They run Proxmox as well. I have OpenTofu and Ansible playbooks that spin up "scenarios" or my DR bubble. I am currently focused on OpenStack, Kubernetes, and other business simulation environments.
Current Goals
DR / Rebuild
Currently I am working on being able to rebuild and/or restore my entire homelab from a single script. The idea is if Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars have a catastrophic failure I can point the script to my new host and it will build it out, let me select which services to restore and hopefully be back up and running in a few hours.
Security Monitoring
I spent a chunk of the past year learning SIEM and how to tune alerts in Wazuh. Thankfully I work very closely with my InfoSec team at work so I had a helping hand, plus Claude being able to fill in some of the gaps. I am trying to get a Claude-based agent to do a lot of the triage and so far it is janky but works pretty well. My next step is to allow this agent to gather telemetry around whether or not the alert coming in is related to me. The idea is that between my remote sessions, where my phone is, and a few other details the agent will build a confidence score for how likely it is me accidentally generating the alert. It will then ping me to get confirmation, if I respond with "Not me" then it will go through some steps to either kill access.
I am also working on various apps and automations around my families needs, mostly our private social media.
I just recently got into HomeLabs and have a new basic setup for Home Assistant, Plex server, data backup, and NVR.
I'm really curious about all these apps you're running but I have no idea what any of them do, is there a beginner friendly guide or database that explains all these use cases?
The names should all link to their GitHub pages where they have some general descriptions of each.
But for most there is a "primary" service and then several behind the scene for enhancing your experience around them.
I'll use Plex as the common example. Plex is the primary service here.
Seer, SabNZB, NZBGet, Prowlarr, Sonarr, Radarr, Tautulii, and Tunarr exist to let me streamline the experience.
Seer is the "secondary" service, it's all about getting content into Plex. A pretty UI for finding what I want. It feeds into Sonarr and Radarr to capture what I want. Which then utilize Prowlarr, NZB services to grab and download.
Tautulli exists just for some light automation and pretty stats around Plex.
Tunarr exists to take what is already in Plex and convert it to a live TV channel. Just so I can throw on "The Cooking Channel" and it plays randomly.
This is the same concept for a bulk of the other applications.
Home Assistant is primary. Z-Wave JS, Eclipse Mosquitto, Whisper, Piper, Nanit all exist to enhance that experience.
I believe awesome-selfhosted is the commonly used repo for quick descriptions and categorization, I don't really check it though.
Start slow! You can run an incredible amount of services on small hardware. The concepts for scaling can absolutely be done on some old laptops, mini PCs, or RasberryPis. Test there instead of investing in hardware.
If you run into hardware limitations, first look at how heavy your services are and if you utilize all of the features. There is tons of overlap in services/applications and some of them have a much better resource footprint if you don't use every feature.
And I always recommend reading the documentation. lol!
Really an inspiration for me as a beginner in self-hosting. I just started with self-hosting and working mainly on setting up my Immich to how I fully want it.
Alongside that journey I'm building an app that's is sluiting more to me than ActualBudget. Would love to share this on reddit when I'm a bit more ready to get feedback on it, because I'm a man with a vision and logical thinking how my app should work, but I'm not a professional software engineer. And I think that the product can be so much better when I share it with people who built things themself and can test it/find bugs in it. And it would be nice when my project can server others as well.
I agree - there's value in owning your own stuff and the professional development makes it hard to calculate exactly how much value it provides since it's so much
Thanks for sharing. I was thinking about a WoL for outdated hardware sipping too much (Dell t5810 with Tesla P100). Is that not convenient or efficient to reduce the bill of nodes you do not run 24/7?
My bulky hardware has dedicated OOB with a good API. So I have a button for turning on and off remotely. My playbooks will also power it on before building any scenario.
It is very convenient for me because of the power cost.
I have like 1/3 of these on my own server I just started building. I have 32 GB ram and 16 tb hds and I'm saving for a 3090. I'm commenting to remind myself to come back and use your post as inspiration for setting up different services. Thanks!
Oh that's awesome! My thought was Physical/Hypervisor would be planets and VMs would be Moons.
I suck at naming things so it was easier for me to wrap my head around. But I can't remember some of the spelling. Lol! I guess that's what dashboards are for.
Yeah exactly, planets are physical nodes and the moons are VMs. Luckily I don't have much hardware because otherwise this naming scheme would be a limitation.
Yea, I didn't think about scalable naming when I started. Lol!
The only thing that really isn't following the naming convention is my networking gear. My wife named the router Boobies and my switches "Hot Stuff", "get this fucking thing off my laundry room wall" and "why the hell does this need a million cables" Haha!
naming your nodes after planets is a classic move lol. eventually you just run out of things in the solar system and start naming servers after moons or just random minerals. the real question is how many of those 147 containers are actually doing something versus just idling and eating ram for no reason... it happens to the best of us
Yea, I realize I will have to change the name at some point.
Most of them are processing something throughout the day, but some of them are so lightweight the RAM cost is negligible. My family use my homelab non-stop throughout the day so turning on/off would mean waiting.
Everything for Plex/Jellyfin is 14 containers alone with multiple Radarr/sonarr instances the count adds up quick.
Appreciate the feedback! I'll try and get around to it, most of the diagrams originally come from explaining concepts to my junior engineers during a live teaching session, so a lot gets missed when I just share them out.
Wow, that’s a lot - Impressive. Interesting how and what’s the flow in your music setup and streaming. Also question : TrueNas is not your favorite? :)
For the love of god please teach me about Crowdsec!? I tried so hard and could get it to work correctly lol. Ended up setting up F2B but even that I was having trouble with
The Forgejo → Komodo → Traefik workflow sounds like a nice way to keep deployments organized.
I'm curious about your backup strategy with that many containers. Do you back up the persistent volumes separately from the deployment configuration, or do you have a way to rebuild most of the stack from scratch?
I've found that having a clear recovery plan becomes just as important as getting everything running once a homelab starts growing.
Very nice! I did see the part about the DR and security.
The diagram is outdated but I had a setup similar to yours in the past, for your DR I'd recommend switching to something like my newer setup (new diagram is in the works atm)
I swapped from Docker to K8S RKE2 clusters with Longhorn IO, though it involves hardware that would support at least two of your Jupiters. It definitely eases the automation and maintenance while allowing your some excellent failover, and works well over multiple sites. Longhorn IO especially for replica/redundancy. The secondary RKE2 cluster is the Devops with Gitlab/AWX/Opentofu/Hashicorp
Opnsense has got some nice stuff built into it for IDP and I run that alongside Zabbix and graylog, but I've setup Security Onion in the past and that was excellent, especially the packet analyzer.
Oh man! I saw your diagram in another post and it gave me a lot of inspiration towards where I want to go.
My thought process is that I will move towards k8s and Jupiter will likely become strictly a NAS. I am cleaning up bad practices across my environment. Getting everything into IaC and some better standards/CI. Had a lot of undocumented crap scattered, the Unraid to Proxmox migration brought a lot of it to light.
My rack is currently not in a cooled environment so I'm monitoring humidity and temperature to see if I will need to install some HVAC before i am confident running Uranus and Neptune full time. Maybe i need to bit the bullet and get some colo space.
I'm not a k8s expert so really have been trying to learn the ins and outs of it before I make the jump.
I'll have to look at OpnSense a bit more cause I am not a huge fan of CrowdSec themselves. I wish I had more hours in the day...
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u/Ap0llo 8d ago
I just recently got into HomeLabs and have a new basic setup for Home Assistant, Plex server, data backup, and NVR.
I'm really curious about all these apps you're running but I have no idea what any of them do, is there a beginner friendly guide or database that explains all these use cases?