What are your Homelab goals for 2025?
What are your Homelab goals for 2025?
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?
Most important: replace the raspi SD card with an SSD
General hardware: see if I find a better solution than my current Proxmox box (repurposed desktop which consumes 60w idling but is capped to 16GB Ram)
Incoming traffic: currently having a VM that runs nothing but nginx and certbot. Considering switching to another reverse proxy and, more important, get proper monitoring of the logs (e.g. IP detection, 403, etc)
Maybe add some iam like authentik
Finding a solution for selfhosting podcasts client with sync on Android and Linux.. gpodder never really seemed to work, considering audiobookshelf.
Probably setting up calibre web and gethomepage
Keeping what I have and maybe optimize a bit:
- Prometheus stack
- plenty exporters
- Nextcloud
- paperless
- home assistant, mosquitto
- pihole
- vaultwarden
- selfoss
On VPS:
- Mastodon
- Bookwyrm
- some WordPress (want to move this to my homeserver as well)
- Install Comms box in office.
- Get Unifi switch.
- Run Cat6A to all rooms of house.
- Consolidate NUC and N100's fewer devices.
- Install 2x U6 Wall units. 6 Begin scoping Surveillance cameras. Torn between Synology and Unifi.
Be brave enough to test my backups
Ouf yeah same here 😅
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
A ton.
- Set up email and website hosting on a VPS to replace current setup
- Get more solid state storage for my home server and finnish immich setup (import photos and all that)
- Set up proper backups for the home server
- Migrate current Unifi controller to home server
- Local VPN server to access home assistant and other services even when travelling
- Spend some time with my home assistant server, fine tune automations, add some more, add sensors and more controls, maybe add a wall mounted tablet for managing the thing and so on, it'll never end and need a visit or two from electrician too
- Better isolation for IOT things on my network. I already have separate VLAN for them without internet access, but it's a bit incomplete project
And then "would be nice" stuff:
- Switch Dahua NVR to something else. Current one works in a sense that it stores video, but movement tracking isn't really perfect and the whole individual NVR box is a bit lacking both in speed and in features
- Replace the whole home server (currently running proxmox, which in itself is fine). It's a old server I got from work, and it does work, but it's not reundant and it's getting old. So something less power hungry and less noisy would be nice. It just asks some money and time, which I have neither in surplus, so we'll see.
- Move home assistant from a raspberry pi to the home server. Maybe add zigbee capabilities next to z-wave and wifi.
And likely a ton more which I don't remember right now. Money and specially spare time to tinker are just lacking.
Very nice goal list, best of luck!
Steps 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 just need some time. I have the stuff pretty much thought out and it's just a matter of actually doing the things. I was sick majority of November, but if it wasn't for that those would have already been completed. The rest need either planning or money. Immich setup would ideally need 2x2TB ssd drives (on raid1 setup) but that's about 500€ out of the pocket and home assistant setup needs time to actually work with it and to plan things forward. Additionally HA setup could use a floor thermostat or two, some homeESP gadgets and so on, so it needs some money as well.
Majority of the stuff should be taken care of until February, the rest is more or less open.
Considering my boot drive just died, backups. Also wanna get a fractal node 804 and cram tons of HDDs in it. Probably a new build with ecc as well. Perhaps transitioning current server to backup server. Also my directory structure for media is a jumbled mess of incomprehensible nonsense. I should fix that. Also I lost all my torrents that I was uploading but still have the media but can't keep seeding after the drive failure.
Goals: keep it running
Add some redundancy to it.
Find a way to copy my iCloud files to Nextcloud.
docker-ify everything, my nginx, nextcloud, pihole, jellyfin, and basically everything else is a nightmare and I can't even begin to understand how to modify the shit that
2023 me did2023 chatgpt spat out, so having everything in some neat docker composes is gonna help immenslyalso making the Pi that everything's hosted on boot of an SSD instead of a cheap chinese SD card, but that requires money and I'm all out
I docker'd all of my systems a few years ago, and I'm so glad I did. So much easier to manage, and when I lost a system I was able to get most of my services back up and running with minimal configuration on a VM same day.
As for hardware, you might check and see if you've got a local reseller of retired business equipment. Before I moved, I had a place I went to from my work that accepted shit we were getting rid of that disposed of stuff and resold at a bargain the stuff that was still good. I got more than one hp tower from a few years previous that ran (and still runs) like a champ. Felt like night and day when I upgraded to that from my Pi setup, and they were only like $35 each.
the pi's serving me very well for now, load average at idle 0.01 and when doing stuff it hovers at around 50, temps under 40°C even under load and an extremely low noise level (not to mention the almost non-existent power draw)
if one day I decide to go full homelab with proxmox and stuff i might buy a dedicated tower but I don't see the appeal atm
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.
I just want jellyfin to organize media properly.
Permissions ok, it detects the fils in the software, then the folders are just empty. I know its my incompetence but been bashing my head against that wall a while.
Certain media categories fix 1 or two podcasts and then other categories break the ones that it fixed.
Naming conventions? Metadata? File types?
One day
So many tv shows broken by two-part episodes!
Migrate from Unraid in a massive tower to a proper JBOD rig in a rack. Finally set up ARM SBC k8s cluster for most things alongside the old x86 hardware for a few services and running the NAS as I don't know how I'd hook that up to the SBCs.
Definitely check out k3s. I ran a 7 node arm64 cluster for a couple years and it served me well. I’ve since graduated to proxmox/ceph and all that, wish me luck 😅
Ya I'm actually running k3s on em now but they dont do much as I'm switching them all over to eMMC or m.2 storage for the os.
I've installed k8s manually before and that's a fools errand. K3s is so much smoother.
Its a group of rock64 and old pi. Picked up a new orange pi5 as well so itll be a three server node k3s setup.
I was evaluating ceph but I think its overkill for my use. Too many drives needed 😅. I'm okay with parity and none of the data stored is irreplaceable. The stuff that is is off site backed up.
I really just want to mimic the Unraid drive setup and move to infra as code as its easier for me to maintain.
I may end up with proxmox in the end who knows.
I want to make an sbc nas, as I dont need much. But finding the right sbc is hard, hoping the odroid h4+ will do the trick.
Checkout openmediavault they develop on some sbcs so the forum should be helpful
Double Storage space (Done!)
Done for the year already!
Figure out why my new 10GbE NIC won’t read in my repurposed gaming rig (now server), get all my storage migrated over to Ceph, transition my services over to Proxmox hosted Talos k8s stack from my RPi-hosted k3s stack.
Building a new, bigger, storage server using TrueNAS scale. I’ve been on CORE forever and it works well. Running out of space, though, and might as well upgrade the OS too.
Second NAS - I've filled up the first one.
- Deprecate the Raspberry Pi entry point for incoming traffic, move to NUC instead.
- Switch from PiHole to Adguard
- Move IoT equipment to separate VLAN
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 need to get off ESXi and onto....Proxmox i guess. Xcp-ng is great except no virtual network switches.
Eh, xcp-ng runs open vSwitch
Well heck, I hadn't really figured that outm . also I need to learn containers so proxmox might still be the thing
I have a dual socket R620 with 256gb RAM that I never turn on (proxmox) and another box with a single xeon 1518d (esxi). Collapsing both down to a repurposed Sophos SG135 (atom c3558) with 32g ram, 512gb sata and a noctua fan (proxmox). I already use another sg135 running opnsense. I run mostly lightweight loads anymore (HomeAssistant, netbox, unifi controller) so I really don't need things turned on that have overkill horsepower. I have a separate file server that I need to upgrade sometime (old 4 core bulldozer amd) but it keeps chugging away.
Harvester cluster my everything. I really want to play around with having my servers being stationary, a togo cluster (laptops, and UPS in a suit case), and PC all in the same cluster.
Right now they are all segmented rke2 clusters, but Harvester should make running vms way easier too.
Buy a home.
Buying a 16 TB hard drive for... purposes.
You can say piracy here, it's a safe space. Or, ya know, porn.
Both tbh.
Centralised identity management, particularly for machine logon, NFS and maybe a few of the services I run.
- Finish building a mini-rack with a server (almost done).
- Finish cabling the house with CAT6 cables.
- Migrate the current VPS running my docker services to the self-hosted server.
- Implement a NAS on the server using a virtualized OpenMediaVault instance.
- Migrate my network infrastructure from a single asuswrt-merlin router to OPNSense + Cisco Switch.
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 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.
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.
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.
Start setting one up.
Same!
Have fun!
My server is exactly as I need. Basically 1 year old now. This year I really want to do vlans to control the network more than an off the shelf router. I work in tech and still am struggling because all I know is meraki bullshit and that's not priced for the typical home user.
I'll need a few AP's and a switch and firewall. I don't know what to get or what to buy and each research session ends with more options than I started with. Anyway that's my goal. I'll get there eventually.
Many goals, little time, so we'll see what actually materializes 😅
- Reimplement my Grafana+Loki stack on public cloud, replace Promtail with a proper Prometheus pipeline (queries are making my qnap go brrr)
- Start up an Immich instance and migrate Google photos to it
- Set up Authentik or something equivalent for the aforementioned services and others. I already have a basic Traefik test config without authentication but still don't have it working 100%, so everything stays on TailScale for now
Traefik+immich+Authelia here, works good. You can use the traefik bypass secret header to let Immich through authelia.
Probably possible in some fashion with authentik too, haven't tried it yet.
Get a domain and set about moving over to HTTPS with Let's encrypt and Nginx.
Learn to write an Nginx config. NPM just works so good though.
Fix my permission issues. I have my media zpool on 777 so all the LXCs work and I have to run Libation in a VM as root. I've been banging my head against this on and off for a while.
Figure out why paperless isn't saving to the correct place. Also, figure out where Paperless is saving to.
Containerise Libation.
I give friends and family access to my server via a relay, just a raspberry pi 0 with Tailscale, pihole and nginx on it. I have reasons for going this route. Anyways, get a couple more of those into the wild. Also streamline the process somewhat.
Learn to and create an ACL config for tailscale so I can have services access nothing, users access services, and admins access everything.
Why not caddy?
Momentum really. I'm on NPM now, it works and it's great. I didn't put much thought into it. I'm generally happy with npm, it's mostly just something to learn next and plain nginx made sense.
Check out traefik as an alternative to nginx or npm
I need to move my mishmash of hard drives, fans, cables, and NUC into a proper NAS box, with a proper power supply and a mini itx motherboard.
Right now it's really just setting up DNScrypt, and maybe swapping some equipment out for lower power consumption.
get around cgnat finally
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.
Tailscale? 👉👈 🥺
That's what I'm currently using and it doesn't cut it, especially for streaming movies
New provider, VPS, or CloudFlare tunnels.
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 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.
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.
I got no backups ao ur doing better than me. If 1 ssd dies there goes all my data.
Backups are key! Need to work on this myself too!
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.
Get everything migrated across to my new k3s cluster. I’ve been using larger boxes (unraid) and a couple of 1L mini PCs with proxmox to run my homelab until now.. but I work with kubernetes and terraform daily and wanted something declarative.
I’ve now got k3s setup with a handful of services migrated (Immich, Tailscale, Nextcloud etc) but there’s still a ton to go (arr suite, various databases, Plex, Tautulli etc). It’s another job entirely.
I love it but sometimes I wonder why I do this to myself 😅
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
- don't break stuff
- upgrade to microOS from Leap, without violating step 1
- reduce the physical footprint of my server (currently in a massive case, would like to go to mini-ITX)
My city is also planning to roll out fiber, so upgrading my network may become a priority if that happens. My current ISP is limited to 100mbps, but I should be able to get 10gbit once they hook me up (though I'll probably stop well short of that).
Moving to a rack is nice, I love my rack. If you’re in or near a city I suggest keeping an eye on Craigslist and ebay (search by distance nearest and lowball ones that have been sitting for months) because it’s not uncommon for nice racks to go real cheap as long as you come get them. I got my rack realllll cheap ($40, 42u, fully enclosed with massive pdu) because it’s a 90s ibm rack and it’s welded steel so it’s like 450lbs. Moving it was a nightmare but it’s real sturdy and I’m never moving it again now that it’s in my basement
For my goals in the short term I have to replace a sas cable that caused a crc error on one drive, it only happened once per smart data but still want to get that done asap. I also have another drive that’s beginning to show some smart issues; it’s on the same sas cable so it may be related because the errors didn’t increase (they all were related to an unclean shutdown, confusing things) but it’s old anyway so better safe than sorry I guess.
Medium term I want to finally upgrade my ups. The one I have now is not a rack mount which is part of what led to the unclean shutdown. It’s also a bit undersized. I have a generator for my house so I don’t need something massive but the one I have is 450va and several years old so with the tired battery I only can get about 5m of runtime. It’s more than enough to cover the transfer from power cutting out to generator power but I want something that’s a bit more reliable in case of generator failure. This is pricey though because my array is pretty huge so it’ll probably be held off unless I find a good deal on a dead one that has cheap batteries available
I also want to put the rack on its own circuit. This is something I should do asap because it’s cheap, just gotta find time and rearrange my panel a bit because it’s pretty full. This would be the other part of the unclean shutdown as the outlet would be in a much better location and I could also install a locking outlet
Would also be nice to pick up a super cheap monitor locally, like something for $15-20 from a pawn shop or Craigslist or something for the rack. Earlier this year I had nginx crash on my server and the webui became inaccessible, I had to drag my nice and kind of large desktop monitor down to the basement to solve the issue, would be nice to just have a shitty small monitor on the rack for that
Speaking of nginx I keep meaning to setup some kind of reverse proxy or mdns for all my dockers so that I can just do whatever.whatever instead ipaddress:3993 which makes my password managers barf but I’ll probably just be lazy and edit my hosts file
Longer term I want to add a secondary low power server that can run something like pfsense to handle my routing, then turn my current wireless routers into access points because they kind of suck as routers.
And of course the array could always be bigger, especially if drive prices fall
I will probably realistically only do the drive and cable replacement, the circuit thing since that’ll be like $40 and a half hour of work, the monitor if I can find one, and maybe the hosts file thing. If I run into cash (unlikely) or a crazy deal (you never know) the ups would be my next priority but there’s a million other things going in life (deductibles just reset for health insurance, hooray)
ipvlan / macvlan containers?
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
"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) :)
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.
Moving my servers to Arch (EOS) as my trial for one during 2024 was successful, rock solid. Swapping my router to a Unifi Express as I am switching to an ISP which finally allows me to do so.
What is the advantage of an arch based server over Debian ?
I had the unfortunate experience that major upgrades on Debian did break the system twice alreay (different servers though). Doing small, incremental package upgrades seems like less of a risk, I can more easily track major package upgrades.
Also it is my homelab, not a production environment, a place where I try new things and play around. So curiosity is always a reason as to why I do things as well.
Thinking about setting up a NixOS or Guix firewall/router. I like OpenWRT but upgrades are a bit annoying, although should improve with the new packaging system.
The idea of having a single config file I can deploy on new hardware almost immediately is very appealing, however.
I can recommend pfSense.
It uses a single config file and upgrades are painless.
If you need to restore the system (I had a drive failure once), just boot up the installer, supply your config file (ie on the same stick) and it will re-install everything just as it was.
NixOS is really good
10gb network, a second proxmox host and outside backup
Thank you, I didn’t realize I needed goals
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.
Transition my main host to Linux, maybe Plex to Jellyfin, setup a switch (have an RS900 and access to acquire a free CS2960), a UPS or two. I may also wind up getting my hands on some PoE cameras and APs. Run some cable too.
Nice dude! Jellyfin has defo been a nice change for me which i switched to during 2024.
I don't really need all the fluff that Plex has but the only thing holding me back is no PS5 support.
Replace Blue Iris with Frigate + Coral
Set up Immich with proper backups
Set up Peertube
Increase my storage pool to fit 100% of my local backups.
Nearline my critical backups
Move my remote backups from BackBlaze to synctoy untrusted crypt on a pie at work.
Frigate and a Coral TPU work amazing. I've had them and Home Assistant setup for the last year or so and have been quite happy.
I'm honestly very excited I bought the coral about 2 months ago and it's just been sitting there. I even loaded proxmox on a laptop with a decent GPU. I'm just so sick of alerts every time headlights flash up in my driveway or a cloud goes over....
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.
I will be moving my entire homelab to a different country, which currently consist of two kubernetes nodes, a NAS and various home automation devices. I will be scaling down gradually, taking cold storage backups of everything and plan to resurrect everything on new hardware once I have moved.
I just reached all my goals at the end of 2024. So stretch goal in my case.
40 gig network for private ceph traffic. Do aggregation on all the nodes for redundancy. Maybe expand to 5 nodes from 3.
Last year I wanted to set up a budget media PC and got enamored by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCDmHljsinY
I got a 600 G3 with the 4560 processor, installed Debian onto it and hooked it to my 4k TV mainly to run immich and stremio.
Immich runs just fine, though I have gotten too fast behind its upgrades and having less knowledge about Docker, I'm afraid to update immich. Need to figure that out.
But what disappointed me was that my good quality videos (even the downloaded ones) are choppy to run (unlike the fluid expectations from the video above) and I don't really know what I should look into to make it better.
Hardware Haven is one of my favs, so much inspiration to gain from that channel!
I'm waiting until immich is stable before I even switch over to it, should be sometime this year
Buy a NAS , sell my old gaming pc (acting as 1 node in my proxmox cluster of 2), buy a second mini pc, learn more about backups and fallbacks and all that fun stuff
Hopefully I can finally get the IPv6 stack fully working.
OPNsense works, Proxmox works, LXC works, Docker works but Docker Swarm does not.
Either I move away from Docker Swarm or a miracle happens and they finally fix their IPv6 support in 2025.
As a networking noob: what are the benefits to having/using an IPv6 stack? I realize that eventually we all have to move to IPv6, but any point in being early on it?
IPv6 is pretty much identical to IPv4 in terms of functionality.
The biggest difference is that there is no more need for NAT with IPv6 because of the sheer amount of IPv6 addresses available. Every device in an IPv6 network gets their own public IP.
For example: I get 1 public IPv4 address from my ISP but 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 IPv6 addresses. That's a number I can't even pronounce and it's just for me.
There are a few advantages that this brings:
- Any client in the network can get a fresh IP every day to reduce tracking
- It is pretty much impossible to run a full network scan on this amount of IP addresses
- Every device can expose their own service on their own IP (For example: You can run multiple web servers on the same port without a reverse proxy or multiple people can host their own game server on the same port)
There are some more smaller changes that improve performance compared to IPv4, but it's minimal.
I love havingipv6. Hard to learn and had roadblocks but now that it's set up works fine.
Does it matter no but just nice to know I have it figured out.
Finalise my physical network to have at least one available port in every essential room & build a new home server/NAS.
While not really for my hosting, I want to upgrade the Wi-Fi speeds in my home, currently running an eero setup that provides good coverage, but the speed seems poor when transferring large files around the home.
Not sure what to get, but this is my goal.
Get VLANs working, proper IOT network isolation, and Nextcloud as my primary document storage. If that first one didn't bring down my homelab entry time I try I'd be more inclined.
VLANs for the win! Was a difficult process for me too when i first setup my Omada stack, but got there in the end. Very nice to have it sorted. While you're at it, you might want to look into having a seperate wifi for guests! I at least have a very limited guest wifi, with a QR code guests can scan when they come in to my house - neat little thing for them, plus i dont have to worry about their devices on my network.
finish setting it up
I have all the hardware laying around collecting dust
The fun part is putting it together and watching it all work smoothly! Best of luck dude 👍
I loathe to grind all the software setup, it's so dull, yet I have to concentrate to not fuck anything up.
Just wanted to vent.
Thank you 🫰
Replace proxmox with incus.
I'm on proxmox too and now very curious as to why you want to move to incus.
Given the topic, the response and the location I'm going to go with "because it seems neat and could be fun".
Now, since I now know if it I'm going to give it a crack. 😆
same
From a hardware perspective I need more storage. Am thinking I'll probably end up with a second Synology NAS unit before the end of the year with 4 hard drives at whatever a reasonable price vs size point it at the time I do it (likely 12-14Tb drives at this stage). Bought drives 2 at a time last time so I'm running two RAID1 pairs right now on the existing unit - adding 4 new drives at once to the home lab will let me move all that content to the new drives and reformat the existing ones into a RAID5 array and get an extra 12Tb of storage.
The one I already have does support adding the 5 drive expansion bay, but figuring that with a second NAS I can move some of my Docker instances currently running on a dedicated laptop onto the second NAS which takes one computer out of the setup as well.
Maintenance wise I've just only done my 2024 maintenance stuff that I do each year. This year it was going through my password vault and making sure everything was synced up, had complex passwords, had two factor enabled where applicable, etc, as well as setting up unique email addresses for every service I'm using (they just forward to the same inbox) to help me track who's been selling my info. Have already found a local fast food outlet who has from that.
Have also rotated all my SSH keys, made sure they were all upgraded to Ed25519 from RSA, set up unique keys for the three devices I regularly use so I can revoke one individually if required, made sure all my hardware was running the latest updates (my RPi running my Pi-hole instance was still on Buster so I had to get that updated before I could even update Pi-hole), etc.
Also swapped my Mullvad connection on my gateway to use Wireguard instead of OpenVPN since they're dropping support later this year.
Honestly I'd love to invest in some sort of rack mounting for home, its something I should look into some more, but right now I just have a whole section of the wardrobes in my study for equipment and tech storage. It's working for now although I worry about it in summer with not a massive amount of heat dissipation in there. This weekend is supposed to be close to 40 degrees Celsius both days 🥵
In 2025 RAID does not work. It will not protect you from errors. it's all a mirage. The only sane option these days is ZFS.
I've got ZFS on my older NAS which is a FreeNAS box I build myself a while back (an old HP N40L), the Synology one is using BTRFS (only because it doesn't support ZFS). That being said, I'm well aware of bitrot, the RAID is to protect against a drive dying, and the vast majority of stuff on the NAS is stuff where a flipped bit isn't going to be the end of the world even if the file system doesn't catch it. For stuff that's more important I keep multiple copies of it or and/or have a backup in the cloud.
Hardware-wise:
- Reorganize my networking closet and rack up my switches
- Replace my core switch with 10 gbit, connect up 10Gbit fiber to my laptop dock and one of my nodes still on copper
- Add 3 more nodes to my cluster with nvme storage so that I can start an erasure-coding pool in ceph.
Software wise, too many projects to count lol
I want to look into quadlets
They're actually quite annoying, the documentation is there but makes a lot of assumptions about what you already know.
I prefer podman systemd generate...just makes more sense to me.
A pain in the ass. Great but did not fit my needs. Dependent containers would fail a lot during upgrades. Kept trying to figure it out and then just said WTF am I doing this all works fine in docker.
Oh, that doesn't sound great. One reason I was looking into it was because Docker seemingly doesn't allow optional mounts which has been causing some issues. My home assistant is using a network attached USB device through a raspberry pi somewhere else in the house. Sometimes it would disconnect and take down my entire home assistant instance.
I'm still in the middle of a K8s migration. It's overkill for a home user, but I want the upskilling.
I've got a QNAP NAS with self-managed linux for storage, and a MS-01 with an RTX A2000 for compute. They're connected over 10Gb SFP+. I'm more than half way done, especially considering I mostly know what I'm doing now.
I still need to figure out the idiomatically right way to schedule pods with their storage, but I got GPU workloads going recently. Next up is migrate the last of the docker-compose from the storage node.
Loving all these goals and ideas!
Lots to think about and put on the to do list!
Great question and I'm loving the action.
All I need to figure out is how to replicate one trunas pool to another trunas machine as a backup.
replication tasks are all failing, rsync is taking absolutely forever, and I need my backup, I feel naked!
I'm due a backup and other than that I hope nothing breaks
I want to build a whole new server, starting with a wooden case that makes it perfectly silent (but allows for good air flow).
Btw: does anybody know what bad things actually happen if there is no metal cage that blocks all the radio?
Never good to intentionally pollute.
Btw: does anybody know what bad things actually happen if there is no metal cage that blocks all the radio?
Noise happens. Could be no problem, or it could hurt your wifi or mobile data connections, or maybe raise a neighbor's ham radio noise floor. I saw this recently when setting up a pi to run BirdNet-Pi. The USB3 connection to an SSD caused enough noise in the 2.4GHz band that the onboard wifi radio could only connect on the 5GHz band.
Rebuilding my main router to work with 10gbe fiber that recently became available here. Although it is a tad expensive, so I am not actually sure yet if I will upgrade my contract.
Top 1 for me would be a strong backup mechanism, and by that I mean something that is tested. Currently I have restic in place but I don't even know if in case of a disaster the backups are ok.
And considering my lack of time, I would be happy with just that.
I am doing exactly the same as what the OP is doing. In addition to that, I will unify my beelink mini PC proxmox server and our old Intel atom NAS into one rack server with AMD EPYC, proxmox and truenas in a VM.
I sure hope our landlord and the Internet operator can agree on the operator finally bringing fiber cables to all apartments. Then I would have fast enough uplink to my homelab.
I'm begging for fiber too! It's 2025 gosh darn it 😁
Yeah... So I'm in Berlin, and in Germany the internet operators finally are building fiber everywhere. The provider who lays the fiber to our street is Deutsche Telekom, and they promise to pay everything: laying the fiber, bringing it to our house and bringing the fiber to every apartment for a two year monopoly on fiber internet after which it's up for competition using their cables. What needs to happen next is our landlord (a Swiss company) and house management company to agree on these guys to come in, put little fiber dividers to every floor and drill a hole to the walls so we get the fiber cable to our apartment.
Of course this being Germany, they are very slow on agreeing on that, we might need to go to court and for sure we need to talk to our neighbors who own their apartments to push them a bit. I'd expect us to get the connection maybe before end of 2025. But eventually it will happen...
Add an NVMe cache to my server and upgrade RAM if pricing permits.
From the software side there are a lot of open feature requests I keep adding to my backlog, like setting up a mail archive, reconfiguring my network (separate IoT devices into separate VLANs), maybe reconfigure some of my containers, …
- Setup my two offsite backups at work and family home.
- Decide if I want more storage or to start deleting some media.
- Setup a work server.
- Something fun?
Finish my migration to my local Kubernetes cluster. Tired of running a mix of vms, docker, and bare metal. I got it setup and a few things, just have to power through.
I also need to bump the drive size in my NAS as I’m running low and want to leverage it more, not less. (Pods use PVs hosted on the NAS over NFS or iSCSI).
And get my offsite backups going again, I had to move this last year and it put a real damper on my goals for last year so there’s a lot of “got the stuff just have to make it work”.
Edit: the UDM Pro is pretty nice. That, a rack and a 2.5G enterprise switch were last year’s acquisitions.
Move from Ubuntu to Debian and add more cameras to frigate.
Nothing fancy but I found an old RPI3 and want to selfhost Vaultwarden and piped on that thing to give my parents a way to watch YouTube without those nasty ads and give them a proper and easy way to store their password. (Over wireguard tunnel)
Also If the universe aligns buy a N100 or 200? To host my own router/switch setup and finally take advantage of my 5Gbit fiber 🫤. I still need to figure out how I get WiFi AP to work with a N100...
Not much but I have a lot other things to figure out but mostly software wise :).
I'm designing a modular rack shelf mounted 3D printed server case. I hope to finish it by moving my backup server to the new case.
I want to move my 4x SFP+ from their current MicroTik switch to my new Brocade. Then I'm very strongly debating running both VM and Ceph over the same 10Gbps connections, removing the ugly USB Ethernet dongles from my three Proxmox Lenovo M920q boxes.
After that? Maybe look at finally migrating Vault off my ClusterHat to Kubernetes.
At some point I need to migrate off Hyper-V. Probably to Proxmox.
Ugh. I don’t wanna.
It would be to replace my 4-bay Synology DS918 NAS with something with more drive bays and 10 Gbit connectivity
I love my Synology DS1618 - it's a bit older now, but the 10Gbps is a delight.
I want to improve my notifications. With that I mean emails coming from the server when updates are available when something happens during my rsync backup routines or just when they are completed and so on. Right now I don't really know when something is happening just when the server is not working anymore.
I just got my notification system up and running yesterday actually! Although I went with NTFY. Because I use Proton I cannot use that for notifications, plus I'd like to keep my Homelab separated. NTFY is quite well documented and works with almost any service you throw at it, highly recommend this! ✨
Really a few things. What I am looking to do is create a highly dynamic system where I can easily deploy something by kicking off some automation. To do this I am first creating a base Ceph shared filesystem. This will be mounted in all VMs so that I can use Ansible to quickly spin up Docker containers via docker compose. This will make it much easier to dynamically create resources and services since I won't need to worry about all the underlying components. I simply kick off the automation for any changes. I already have the automation to create new VMs.
I'm currently saving up to buy a fractal design node 804 to build a NAS with 4 drives within. Also trying to create some more reliable backups using said NAS.
@Sunny
Backup, Tailscale, AuthentikTailscale is amazing! I've tried many different solutions but always keep coming back to Tailscale for it's simplicity.
