I’ve recent gone down the homelab rabbithole. Learning new things and engaging with a huge community has been rewarding. I used to be a huge technology geek but lost the curiosity 10+ years ago. Homelabbing has brought back that curiosity and I love it.
Any other homelabbers out there? #homelab #proxmox
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Any things ago. years be gone curiosity community I #proxmox
been rewarding. curiosity geek there? but new out has #homelab homelabbers recent brought and Homelabbing the and Learning rabbithole. back the has engaging technology 10+
I #homelab. Grabbed a cheap 4-bay NAS box. It's just a generic linux machine loaded with drives. It runs a bunch of native and docker workloads to manage media and a personal wiki. I have resisted doing anything mission-critical on it because I don't want downtime to ever be urgent -- I already have a job and this shouldn't feel like one.
Love it. Definitely needs to be fun like you said. I just put Audiobookshelf on the Proxmox box as Audible kept removing the books I bought. But all the stuff I’m running isn’t mission-critical and easy to redo, but I do need to come up with a back up solution so I don’t have to reconfigure everything if something does happen.
Next will be tinkering with Docker. I’m waiting to see how much the new Minisforum NAS will cost. If reasonable I’ll probably move to Truenas and away from Synology as they’ve abandoned the home user. I love Synology still but the steps they are taking recently isn’t great IMHO.
Docker is a game-changer for managing upgrades. I don't do a ton of audio books, but I have a pile of photos, ebooks, video, and a music collection going back to the mid 90s. Hosting my own wiki as a knowledgebase is super useful. Same with Readeck for remembering the things I read.
I use tinc to access the box from wherever, which lets me use the wiki while out and about. It's like wireguard, with smarter routing. If I am at home, I get a direct connect instead of going out to my vpn server and then back in to my home to reach the NAS. Tinc is a pain to put on a phone, though. Wireguard is much easier to setup and maintain on mobile.
For back up, borg-backup is pretty great, but for low-value data (e.g. popular media) I just rsync a copy somewhere periodically and call it good enough. Tinc lets me put a box offsite and back up to it pretty easily. If you want something more commercial, Backblaze is solid and inexpensive.
I've never used a commercial NAS box, just generic linux boxes with lots of drive bays. There's something unsettling about depending on Synology not to forget who their customer is. For most things I want to do, that's good enough, though I am probably missing some ease-of-use features I don't even know about!
Good luck with your #homelab!
I was messing around with tailscale which seems to work well. I just like spinning up containers and VMs Willy Nilly. Sounds like you’ve been at it for awhile.
Welcome to the hobby!
