Home Lab Overview

Home labbing has been something of a hobby for the last 2 years.
Started rather humbly and without a sense of purpose and quickly became an obsession.
Here I hope to capture some of the things I've built these last 2 years

Update 31/1/2025

All of this are pretty much obsolete as I've moved everything to a 2 node proxmox cluster with raspberry pi 4 for quorum.

I've also migrated a lot of services from Docker to LXC containers for easier backups and high availability.

Will update the post as soon as I can with all the infos!

Below is a screenshot of my current services running.
I've left a few of them out since I'm constantly trying new things.

That's the overview of the software side of things.

Now for the hardware side of it

Modem and router are not really interesting and won't get into them a lot.
My modem is the standard issued from my provider, since I have to use it, and the router bridged to it just covers my home needs without a problem.

The 2 mini PCs currently running are:

HP G3 Elitedesk
AMD PRO A6-8500B R5 - 2 core 2 thread CPU with a base clock of 1.6Ghz and a boost of 3Ghz
8GB of DDR4 RAM
256 GB nvme for Proxmox
1 TB SSD as an SMB share

Not a powerhouse. But more than capable running Proxmox VE with multiple containers and a Home Assistant VM without breaking a sweat, all while sipping power at <10W.

ASRock X300 Deskmini
AMD Ryzen 3200G - 4 cores 4 threads with a max boost of 4Ghz
32GB DDR4 RAM

4TB total storage - 1 nvme and 2 SSDs - with a spare nvme slot for future upgrades

I'm pretty happy with the performance and stability (yes, even on Windows) with the system again drawing <15W at idle

Overall a great platform and a great mini pc.

Somewhere around December 2021 I stumbled upon Home Assistant wanting to take control of my smart home devices which were from different companies, all with a different app making things more complicated that it needed to be.

Since Home Assistant runs as an OS, I tried it on my Windows machine through VirtualBox. That was the first rabbit hole.

I also had an old Raspberry Pi Model B, which I had bought in 2012 and not used in a decade or so. I installed DietPi in it and run PiHole for network-wide adblocking and DNS which in turn taught me a lot about networking in general.

Next came Docker, which I had never heard before. Got it running on the same machine with WSL and installed Portainer to manage containers.

Then came Reddit and r/selfhosted. After that Awesome-Selfhosted

Plex, VPN solutions, monitoring etc. all soon followed

Now I get to watch and share my movies with friends and family, listen to my audiobooks and podcasts, block intrusive ads, run my smart home devices locally and other cool stuff like even self hosting this webpage!

As I add more articles documenting the services I'm running I'll update this page also.