A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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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
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, …
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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 got no backups ao ur doing better than me. If 1 ssd dies there goes all my data.
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.
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.
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.
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 🫰
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 🥵
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.
Hardware-wise:
Software wise, too many projects to count lol