My homelab setup

I self-host a couple useful services in my home to save on cloud- and subscription costs. Realistically, it has probably cost me more considering the hardware and headaches it's caused me so far. But at the end of the day I like tinkering with this sort of stuff, and it's been running fairly smoothly for the past 18 months or so. So let's dive in!

Services

At the centre of my homelab setup is Proxmox. It currently runs on one node (a second-hand HP ProDesk 600 G5 Mini with an i5-9500T CPU and 8GB of RAM) and it's running 4 LXCs:

• Jellyfin: Streaming media locally instead of relying on several costly streaming service subscriptions. Set up with hardware transcoding.
• Pi-hole: Blocking ads and malware network-wide.
• Alpine with Caddy: A reverse proxy to connect to the other services with a memorable domain name instead of IP address + port number.
• Linux ISO download stack: To download media to stream with Jellyfin Linux ISOs. Running Sonarr, Radarr, Seerr, Bazarr, Prowlarr, and Deluge in a Docker Compose stack.

I have another of the same HP ProDesk boxes that I'm struggling to find a use for. I had it set up as a gaming server (behind a Pterodactyl panel on Proxmox), but I wasn't using it much at all. Suggestions to put it to good use are welcome!

The non-config data (i.e. media files, backups, and personal documents) is on a Synology DS920+ NAS with 3 4TB drives and a single 8TB drive in SHR (Synology Hybrid RAID) for a total of ~10TB of usable storage. This storage is shared with the Proxmox virtual environment via an NFS shared folder so that the services can access the media files Linux ISOs.

Critical data on the NAS is continuously backed up to Backblaze B2 for long-term reliability. This does not include the media Linux ISOs as they can probably be downloaded again fairly easily.

Networking

Powering the networking of the whole operation is a UniFi UDM Pro SE mounted in a (once again second-hand) Canovate 9U server rack. This server rack has a patch panel for easy access, as well as a shelf to house the NAS and the 2 HP ProDesk machines.

To access the services when I'm away from home, I use the WireGuard VPN built into the UDM. I don't need this very often; mostly for quickly checking settings and requesting new media Linux ISOs via Seerr.

What's Next

I have some tentative plans to improve the setup:

• Centralized logging & metric collection. All these services put out loads of logs onto their own volumes. This causes me to have to go into each of the volumes every so often to clean up logs. I'd like to collect all logs into a central location for better observability and to keep the local volumes lean.
• Automations using HomeAssistant. I'd love some unobtrusive automations to make my life a little easier.
• Config backups. Each service currently has its own config on the Proxmox box, and I don't have proper backups in place. Ideally the config for each of the services is backed up periodically to a secure location so I can rebuild if things go awry.