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?
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Probably a hardware upgrade of some kind. The i5-7500 is not cutting it for Minecraft servers with mods and Arma 3 servers, single thread performance is just too slow. So I may grab an i3-14100 or similar and a motherboard and do that swap.
- Log Monitoring and Collection.
- More storage for my plex/nextcloud servers
- VLANs for my servers.
- Move to K8s
- Better service monitoring
- New server to set devpods up on
Be brave enough to test my backups
Ouf yeah same here 😅
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.
Buying a 16 TB hard drive for… purposes.
You can say piracy here, it’s a safe space. Or, ya know, porn.
Both tbh.
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.
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?
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
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 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.
On the topic of build times, it took me too long to learn that nixos-rebuild supports remote build workers and targets.
For example, if I am editing on my laptop, want to build on my desktop, and apply the build to my file server, then I’d run…
me@laptop$ nixos-rebuild test \ --flake ~/wherever-it-lives \ --build-host desktop \ --target-host file-server \ --use-remote-sudoThe host names should match the name of the nixosConfiguration output from your flake. If they don’t I think you can specify like,
--target-host .Remote sudo avoids having to SSH as root.
Bonus tip: Having Tailscale on every machine makes this work reliably from anywhere, network speed as the limit.
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!
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.
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.
No reason you can’t use NixOS in a VM on Proxmox.
My container host OS is another immutable, uCore, which I run in a VM on Proxmox.
Never said you couldn’t I was assuming OP was running VMs inside of Nix
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
Start setting one up.
Have fun!
Same!
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.
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.
