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?
You must log in or register to comment.
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
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.
Actually have a decent backup system and data repetition
This, my ssd randomly disappeared on my proxmox server January 1st so I had to start from scratch. Didn’t have any docker compose backups or lxc backups… I suppose this time I can do everything right now lol
Do git :)
Buying a 16 TB hard drive for… purposes.
You can say piracy here, it’s a safe space. Or, ya know, porn.
Both tbh.
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!
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
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.
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.
A relatively newish SBC can run Jellyfin and even do some light transcoding (single stream full HD or 2-3 streams SD).
Any particular spec requirement I would need? There are a lot of them in used market but I am not sure what I need.
Raspberry Pi 4 4GB handled it just fine for me the last couple years.
Same mate.
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?
Goals: keep it running
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
Add some redundancy to it.
Find a way to copy my iCloud files to Nextcloud.
Centralised identity management, particularly for machine logon, NFS and maybe a few of the services I run.
Yeah I’ve been toying with FreeIPA for IdM, Keycloak for SSO, and Netbird to create a zero trust internal network. DNS is the hurdle I’m currently figuring my way over
Ha, DNS is the only one of those that I have sorted. I have some reading to do.
What’s your solution? PiHole? The thing I don’t like about the PiHole is the lack of wildcard domain rewrites. I’ve been playing with AdGuard Home and Unbound, not sure what my final solution will be, though.
I have Unbound and a pihole. Started with just unbound but found I needed device specific rules that I couldn’t do. So I setup pihole and some devices use that as published through the DHCP. Things like the Mrs didn’t want certain ad blocking on her devices, but I did everything else. Also means in future I can block more just on the kids devices.
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!
I love Jellyfin (kind of love/hate haha), but I would never trust it to manage my media files themselves.
Is there a way to make a media folder without categorizing it?
Even the “home video and photos” which usually picks up everything struggles with some mp3 podcasts.
I manually manage the media files but I do assign the categories, I just mount it on Jellyfin as read only so it can’t make any changes and it stores the metadata and album art on the Jellyfin system partition.
Gonna try that. Thanks.
Have everything organized on the drive itself. Gotta be meta data messing it up
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.
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
Start setting one up.
Have fun!
Same!
