Homelab admins - What do you run?

[Sephiroth]

As I've recently updated and revamped my homelab, I'm curious as to what others run at home, if at all. What hardware and OS structure, switching, VMs and containers, services, etc.

 

Also, those that do run services at home, like file servers or media servers, do you allow access to others, like family or friends; is it for the household or is it just you?

 

I've been curious for a while what others do as I flip between feeling that my setup is excessive, and that I need more stuff!

 

To kick it off, I have a Dell Poweredge R730 running Proxmox and a backup server running PBS, all networking comes back to a 24 port 1Gb switch with 2 10Gb uplinks, one of which the host is on. I have 2 Server 2025 DCs and a windows fileserver running my AD domain and a PFSense firewall VM. Then theres the LXC containers running services:

 

• Media stack
• Ad blocking
• Minecraft server
• Steam game server
• CCTV server
• Nextcloud
• Meal and recepie planner
• Paperless-ng filesystem
• Photo manager
• Print server
• Home Assistant
• PDF editor
• PXE server

 

All of that with a view to add more in the future... Oh; and multiple VLANs for organisation and security, all coming back to my firewall for appropriate access.

[Rogueleeder]

I have a Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF (?) running a 9th gen i5 with 32GB backed up by a 4 disk Synology. Running Ubuntu Server LTS with Portainer (though going to move to Dockhand) with containers for:

 

Media Stack

Meal Planner/Recipes

EBook Server

Homaar for a friendly homepage

 

Currently thinking about throwing in an old 1660S GPU for some light LLM to do OCR/Web page scanning to support the recipe container and to re-encode my media to HEVC/AV1 to save storage. Might do home assistant when I can find the resources to make it sort of Alexa like.

 

All backed by a Unifi Cloud Gateway Max, old Unifi 8 Port POE switch and some reclaimed U6 Pros. 

 

Also thinking I might build it up again on Debian and merge the NAS and Server into one chassis to save some space in the downstairs cupboard.

 

I did start on Windows Server but since discovering docker and how it sips resources, I can't go back. 

 

How come you run an AD Domain at home? Are all your PCs domain joined?

[andy_b]

Lenovo M720q Tiny PC i5-8400T with 32GB Ram for compute

 

Synology DS1821+ for storage, currently 4 bays occupied with 10Tb HDD

 

Basic unmanaged 1Gb switch

 

Promox with: Comprehensive Media stack Ad Blocking Home Assistant Couple Windows Test VM VPN gateways VPN servers Photo Storage

[tdk1069]

On the infrastructure side, I've got:

• Proxmox VE across three nodes (optiplex's for igpu passthru for transcoding and a mint desktop for pottering on)
• Proxmox Backup Server for backups
• Cloudflare Tunnels and Authentik for remote access and authentication, with Google as an additional identity provider
• Tailscale for private remote access
• Technitium DNS cluster for DNS services
• UniFi for network management of APs

For applications, I'm running quite a collection of services:

• Media: Full media stack with everything you'd expect
• Photos and documents: Immich and Paperless-ngx
• Home automation: Home Assistant, with various integrations and custom components
• Books and reading: Calibre-Web Automated, Audiobookshelf and Kavita (few kobo's syncing)
• Productivity and personal services: Actual Budget, Nextcloud , MediaWiki, nextermand a few other self-hosted applications
• Infrastructure and management: Gitea, Komodo, Homepage, Guacamole, Nextterm, NetBox/NetDoc-related tooling, phpIPAM and a few custom-built projects

Couple of vlans, Ubiquiti router, couple of unifi APs. Synology Rackstation ~22tb for general data and the optiplex's have internal ssd zfs storage for the vm/lxc (I did iscsi off to synology to give shared storage but kept getting random hangs due to blips so went local. that's a wip)

 

Everyone in the house has access to various things via Authentik SSO with either user or admin privs depending, outside family have access to the media stack to request/watch. Think that covers bits I can remember... Tried several times to document it (Hence the wiki)

[mrbios]

Flint 4 router with a HP EliteDesk Mini G5 running Proxmox.

Valheim server

Jellyfin + others

Home assistant

PiHole

 

Accessible via tailscale when im away from home.

 

Edited yesterday at 13:35 by mrbios

[Davit2005]

Believe it or not reading the following I have reduced my complex network, lol. I no longer run a full MS AD at home with MDT, radius and CA services.

 

3 node Proxmox cluster, 2 are Lenovo small servers and the other is a Lenovo Thinkstation acting as a fully fledged node but jus running small VMs

1 physical TrueNas and one virtual

JellyFin

For DNS and Adblocking run 2 Technitium VMs in a cluster with DoH

Aruba networking (switches and APs)

MikroTik 10Gb switch for SMB/NFS Shares and Proxmox sync 

Home Assistant (Docker on a VM)

Host of other VMs that hardly get used

OPNsense Firewalls in HA with FTTP and 4g backup.

Just some simple monitoring with Zabbix and uptime Kuma

Far too many vlans all terminated on firewall with ACLs

A few cloudflare tunnels, one for HomeAssistant and a few others for remote access via O365 auth.

 

Local storage for photos with some backup to cloud storage i.e. AWS might be on the cards as well as local password manager again with backup to AWS will prob be some upcoming projects and yep I think I do need a WiKi, at the moment I jus have a page on HomeAssistant with all the links to admin GUI's

 

 

 

Edited 22 hours ago by Davit2005

[Sephiroth]

3 hours ago, Rogueleeder said:

How come you run an AD Domain at home? Are all your PCs domain joined?

Started as a learning project when I was newish to IT, then just grew from there. Until earlier this year I was running a full Hyper-V node with Storage Spaces. Youngest child's and partner's PCs are domain bound, but eldest has rebuilt his off domain as a choice.

 

I've scaled down M$ to just what I listed above, down from a full system. My next big project is to migrate to a unix based file server, ideally with some for mof DFS, then to get rid of AD in favour of either SAMBA or LDAP, depending on how brave I am.

 

Forgot to mention the nginx reverse proxy on my original list.

Host is currently running 2 x 16 core Xeons, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD capacity, and 44TB datastore.

[Davit2005]

20 hours ago, Rogueleeder said:

How come you run an AD Domain at home? Are all your PCs domain joined?

Like others I did this purely for learning but wanted to run permanently instead of a lab that I'd jus start up when wanting.

 

I no longer work in the server side of stuff apart from managing the services our team provide to end users, those are appliances VMs or Physical and unix/linux based or hardware APs, switches, phones, routers, etc.

Edited 5 hours ago by Davit2005

[dmj]

Just a small openwrt router with 8GB Ram runs all the servers I need in either locally or in containers (pi hole, homeassistant, cloudflared proxy tunnels, dhcp, pxe, fileshare, dhcp, firewalls).

Plus its a wifi access point. 

https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4

https://openwrt.org/

[Roberto]

I have an Intel Nuc based on 11th gen i3, running 

• Portainer, to manage the containers for
• netdata 
• glances 
• npm (nginx proxy)
• openspeedtest  (for home assistant)
• duplicati (backup containers)
• watchtower (updates containers)
• home assistant
• mosquitto (for home assistant)
• ring-mqtt (for home assistant)
• matterjsserver (for home assistant)
• plex
• unmanic (for plex)
• influxdb  (for home assistant)
• grafana (for home assistant)

Edited 4 hours ago by Roberto

[BKGarry]

18 hours ago, Sephiroth said:

My next big project is to migrate to a unix based file server, ideally with some for mof DFS, then to get rid of AD in favour of either SAMBA or LDAP, depending on how brave I am.

 

 

I have no home lab setup, but you are are describing is close to this project (don't know how current it is) https://www.linuxschools.com/forum/index-main.php

 

It might be a starting point for finding how things work with that

[Sephiroth]

Well that's a blast from the past! I remember looking at that over a decade ago but not being able to convice anyone that it was a good idea. Didn't realise it was still going, I'll have to have a look through.

 

Interesting that they're using GlusterFS. It's what I've been looking at but I'm mildly concerned about the backing having been ripped out from it. It still seems the best alternative to MS DFS implimentation.

 

I'm leaning towards samba as it's MS AD compatible. If I'm brave I'll relinquish all MS derived stuff and just go LDAP for simplification.

[garethEds]

I have a computer. 🙂

[NetworkDirector]

I have a Optiplex 7050 mff (i5-6500 with 32gb ram) running Proxmox,with VMs for Windows Server 2022 with AD, Apache server running a custom Home page, Portainer and docker as well. Windows Server has cloud flare funneled remote access via O365 sso.

Wish I could add more but I end up just adding pointless services, I think an actual VPN is next to connect my laptop when I'm out, but not really anything else. 

The plan was to put all computers in my home on AD but ended up doing most of the computers (5) then 2 that are just local user accounts. And then the laptops (4) are on Intune since AD meant they had to be tethered to the network in some way.

 

This set up going strong since 2025 with some minor iterations. 

[BKGarry]

2 hours ago, Sephiroth said:

Well that's a blast from the past! I remember looking at that over a decade ago but not being able to convice anyone that it was a good idea. Didn't realise it was still going, I'll have to have a look through.

 

Interesting that they're using GlusterFS. It's what I've been looking at but I'm mildly concerned about the backing having been ripped out from it. It still seems the best alternative to MS DFS implimentation.

 

I'm leaning towards samba as it's MS AD compatible. If I'm brave I'll relinquish all MS derived stuff and just go LDAP for simplification.

 

Used to be Karoshi linux I do believe, IIRC it was run at a NM at one of the Dover Grammar Schools, I remember having a conversation with her about 20 years ago about it on the old SEGfL email list

[BKGarry]

1 hour ago, garethEds said:

I have a computer. 🙂

I do too, but it's running Linux because I felt like a change hehehehe

[garethEds]

28 minutes ago, BKGarry said:

I do too, but it's running Linux because I felt like a change hehehehe

 

I've been tempted to switch my home PC to Linux but never sure which version to bother with. It's been a while since I've used Linux as a Windows desktop replacement.

[BKGarry]

8 minutes ago, garethEds said:

 

I've been tempted to switch my home PC to Linux but never sure which version to bother with. It's been a while since I've used Linux as a Windows desktop replacement.

 

I am using Nobara, it is based off of Fedora but with gaming tweaks, there is an active discord server for it and the lead dev of that distro is also a senior dev for the Steam Proton layer. I have managed to connect it to work with openVPN if I ever need it, and played every game I actively play (I am not a big multiplayer person)

 

The modified KDE environment is very at home for a windows switch with a lot of little niceties like swapping sound output really easily with one click from the volume control etc.