Personal project
Homelab
- Role
- Designed, built and run it
- Timeline
- Ongoing
- Status
- In daily use
Over twenty services in daily use, backed up every night, with no port open to the internet.
It started with a shared folder my Windows PC and my Mac could both reach, instead of carrying files between them on an external drive. That one NAS folder opened the door to self-hosted software, and I never really came back out.
Today the rack is a two-node Proxmox cluster: an HP EliteDesk 800 G5 with 32GB of RAM and a Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q with 16GB, on 2.5G network cards with a dedicated cluster link. Storage lives on a UniFi UNAS 4 with two mirrored 4TB drives, and a JetKVM gives BIOS access and reboots from anywhere. It all sits in a 3D-printed rack case, an open design I adapted until it fit.
Every service runs in its own LXC container (a lightweight Linux box sharing the host kernel): media, photo backup, DNS ad-blocking, passwords, personal finance and Hermes, an AI agent. Around them sits the boring part that keeps it alive: nightly backups, single sign-on with passkeys, Grafana metrics, phone alerts, automatic security patches and remote access over Tailscale, with no port open to the internet.
Most of what I know about networking and sysadmin work, I picked up here, one broken config at a time.
Build sheet
- Node 1
- HP EliteDesk 800 G5, Intel Core i5-9500 (6 cores), 32GB RAM
- Node 2
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q, Intel Core i5-6500T (4 cores), 16GB RAM
- Storage
- NVMe per node + UniFi UNAS 4, 2x 4TB mirrored
- Network
- 2.5G NICs, 2.5G/10G unmanaged switch, direct cluster link
- Remote access
- JetKVM
- Case
- 3D-printed, custom design
Rack case adapted from Lab Rax 10 server rack on MakerWorld.
Hardware
- Power
- FTTH 10G
- 2.5G con.
Services
Pick a service to read what it does.
Vivatech Interactive Experience
Next project →
Have a project like this in mind? Get in touch.
← Back to projects