The Homelab (Part 1)

This is the business end of the homelab! There's another piece - the firewall, and APs - but my ISP came in and ruined my setup, so that blog will be published at another time. For what it's worth, it's really just OPNSense on a Qotom J4125 PC. Pictured, however, are the parts of the homelab that actually host and run my services.

From the top shelf - my NAS! A PC with a Fractal Node 304 case, Ryzen 3200G + 16GB RAM, and ~ 34TB of total storage (25TB usable) running TrueNAS Scale. This hosts two shares - Personal (which is really just non-media) and Media. Proxmox backups and personal files have a share in Personal, my media (TV shows and Movies that I've collected) have a place on the Media share. Both are made available on my network (DMZ) via NFS.

The second shelf has my AI PC and an HDHomeRun. The AI PC is a Lenovo M720q with an Nvidia T1000 8GB stuffed into it, just running Fedora Server and Ollama. Does fine with smaller models, I'm still searching for a production use... If you look closely, you can see the clumsily drilled speed holes on the case. The HDHomeRun is a box that makes digital TV broadcast available over the network. Plex integrates with it, so I can watch live TV from anywhere I can use Plex (which is anywhere) - $100 well spent. Also allows for two concurrent streams, so I share it with my family.

The bottom shelf is my switch and three Proxmox hosts, which are clustered together. I have a number of VMs, for Pihole, a code server, Plex (using Quicksync for transcode), OpenWebUI, a SearXNG instance, the Ghost instance hosting this page, and a few other odds and ends.

All in all, I've spent thousands on a setup that's pretty okay. It's quiet, and relatively power efficient. The wife doesn't mind it, especially since it has all of her favorite shows on it.