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.
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
Part of the *arr stack, to find some obscur films and old series.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
True. I’d have to get the €11/month box for it though. It’s cheaper to set up one of my Raspberry Pi’s with an external drive I already have. I just need to figue out how it’s best to transfer and dedublicate the data. :)
Personally I’d recommend restic and backblaze b2 if I were you. Dedup and quick.
only need dedup if your data is duplicated
Which they expressly said they wanted in the comment I responded to…
Nope, you don’t need any VPS to use it, it comes with an SFTP interface.
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/
offsite backup for $2/TB and no download fees, 1/3rd the price of B2.
Yeah. I would need the 5 TB one for my stuff, so that is the €11/month box.
Ah, ok I see.
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.
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 .#some-machineRemote 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.
Tried it didn’t like it. To much work to get somethings working. Went back to docker.
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
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.
Goals: keep it running
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 😁
And here I am stuck in an apartment in NYC with one option… spectrum cable. That’s it. I mean you COULD get Verizon DSL (lol) or some horrendously overpriced LTE thing, but realistically you’re at the mercy of whatever bloodsucking landlord thinks you deserve.
@Disaster @Sunny I found tmobile’s 5g to be reasonably priced ($50/mo) and solid speeds. Much better than spectrum, but it depends on how close to a tower you are.
Sadly, https://www.nycmesh.net/ isn’t out in central queens yet.
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…
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 🫰
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! ✨
NTFY Any reason to pick NTFY over Gotify? I’ve been using Gotify for quite a while with good luck, but I would switch if there was a compelling reason.
Not sure myself. Was looking at both options myself but NTFY seemed to have broader support and thats why i went with it. Though i cannot back that claim up, simply from my first impression. If Gotify works well for you then I wouldn’t worry about changing it.
Yup I also use ntfy and it’s brilliant, easy to send notification events to it from almost anything and the android app is very responsive.
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
