What's on My Home Server
Yes. I have a home server.
With a day job and numerous hobbies (watching soccer, listening to too many podcasts, burning leaves, breaking and fixing my internet several times a week, and washing my car way too often), it can be tough to find the time to homelab. Over the last few weeks I have been super busy and have had almost zero time to tinker around and break things on my server. So, I decided I would take an inventory of what I am running in my homelab.
Let me start off by saying that unfortunately I am not running Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, or any < INSERT TOTALLY LEGAL SOFTWARE NAME HERE >. I don’t really have an interest, use, or desire for those illegal streaming or torrenting services that most homelabbers host.
I know, I know… You are saying to yourself, “Do you even homelab if you don’t have any illegal software running? Why would you ever pay for Netflix if you can just download it from < INSERT TOTALLY LEGAL SOFTWARE NAME HERE >?” I am sorry. I don’t have the desire that most homelabbers have to screw over the streaming services. Call me a sheep. I also don’t have the time.
Anyway, mini-rant done. What is running in my homelab?
Currently I am running Proxmox Virtual Environment 7.2-11 with a number of virtual machines and containers. In the past I have run Harvester and even a bare metal instance of Truenas Scale. I will probably wipe my server and test another virtualization platform next week. It’s just the way I use my server.
My hardware details are as follows:
2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz (32 cores total)
64GB of DDR3 1600 MT/s Samsung RAM
1x 256GB SSD Boot Drive
1x 500GB SSD Data Drive
1GB NIC
It’s a pretty substantial system and it does the job well. I also have a UDM Pro as my router.
What do I have running on that hardware:
First container I have running is a pi-hole instance. I go back and forth between NextDNS and pi-hole. I really like NextDNS but pi-hole is a tad faster and snappier. I have given up on AdGuard Home for the time being namely because every time I have used it, it gets slower and slower over time. AdGuard home stans will say its because I configured something wrong. I say, you’re probably right but it’s not worth my time and effort to figure out what it is. I have pi-hole pointed to my CloudFlare Zero Trust DNS server at the moment. It just works well. I can’t pinpoint the reason why. Pi-hole really is great.
Next I have three rancher virtual machines. The first machine serves up the frontend, the second is a master/worker node, and the third is a dedicated worker node. Definitely not HA or anything fancy, but this isn’t critical infra for me. In my kubernetes cluster I run a few different apps. Currently I am running uptime kuma, smokeping, and homarr dashboard. I was previously running nextcloud, mysql-workbench, pi-hole, and flame (another dashboard). No reason as to why I am am not running them now. I have metallb, argo cd, traefik, and cert manager all working together to make sure my apps just work.
I am also running a Windows 11 virtual machine with 10 CPU cores and 24GB of RAM. I have been flirting with the idea of selling my desktop and only using this VM as my sole work and personal computer. I am hesitant to pull the trigger however. DDR4 is always going to be faster than DDR3. Also I have a Radeon RX 580 in my desktop now and I like to play some games every now and then.
I have a virtual machine running Truenas Scale which is hosting an SMB share that I use for ISOs, installers, and Davinci Resolve. Not a huge fan of Truenas Scale, but hey, it does its job well when I need it to.
But that is actually it! I am only running a few things in my homelab like I said before. I am always on the hunt to find new stuff to host. I just haven’t found something that I really want to invest time into that will make my life easier. At one point I had some public websites being served up from my home server but since I moved, I no longer have my own public IP and instead I am behind a CGNAT (A HUUUUGE BUMMER).
I want you to recommend a service for me to try out! Leave a comment below!
That’s it. Hope you enjoyed.
Cheers,
Joe