Personally will be trying to transform my server which is currently in a fractal R5 case, into a small-ish Homelab rack, combined with all my network equipment. Will require complete relocation of all network equipment in the house as well as cables so it will be a bit of a project. Also on the lookout for a good quality rack so let me know if you have any recs. Still unsure if u want to do full width rack or mini. Part of me really want the UDM Pro from Unifi…
What are your goals and thing you want to accomplish during 2025?
Buy a NAS , sell my old gaming pc (acting as 1 node in my proxmox cluster of 2), buy a second mini pc, learn more about backups and fallbacks and all that fun stuff
Be brave enough to test my backups
Ouf yeah same here 😅
Building a new, bigger, storage server using TrueNAS scale. I’ve been on CORE forever and it works well. Running out of space, though, and might as well upgrade the OS too.
Learn how to design an implement effective segmentation for my network, get better with OPNsense, and get my private website up and running
I had a blast learning and configuring vlans for my smart switch and putting all the IOT devices on their own network.
Do you happen to remember what learning resources you used?
I need to transfer my plex server install from my synology NAS to an Intel nuc running plex in docker.
Buying a 16 TB hard drive for… purposes.
You can say piracy here, it’s a safe space. Or, ya know, porn.
Both tbh.
Top 1 for me would be a strong backup mechanism, and by that I mean something that is tested. Currently I have restic in place but I don’t even know if in case of a disaster the backups are ok.
And considering my lack of time, I would be happy with just that.
A ton.
- Set up email and website hosting on a VPS to replace current setup
- Get more solid state storage for my home server and finnish immich setup (import photos and all that)
- Set up proper backups for the home server
- Migrate current Unifi controller to home server
- Local VPN server to access home assistant and other services even when travelling
- Spend some time with my home assistant server, fine tune automations, add some more, add sensors and more controls, maybe add a wall mounted tablet for managing the thing and so on, it’ll never end and need a visit or two from electrician too
- Better isolation for IOT things on my network. I already have separate VLAN for them without internet access, but it’s a bit incomplete project
And then “would be nice” stuff:
- Switch Dahua NVR to something else. Current one works in a sense that it stores video, but movement tracking isn’t really perfect and the whole individual NVR box is a bit lacking both in speed and in features
- Replace the whole home server (currently running proxmox, which in itself is fine). It’s a old server I got from work, and it does work, but it’s not reundant and it’s getting old. So something less power hungry and less noisy would be nice. It just asks some money and time, which I have neither in surplus, so we’ll see.
- Move home assistant from a raspberry pi to the home server. Maybe add zigbee capabilities next to z-wave and wifi.
And likely a ton more which I don’t remember right now. Money and specially spare time to tinker are just lacking.
Very nice goal list, best of luck!
Steps 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 just need some time. I have the stuff pretty much thought out and it’s just a matter of actually doing the things. I was sick majority of November, but if it wasn’t for that those would have already been completed. The rest need either planning or money. Immich setup would ideally need 2x2TB ssd drives (on raid1 setup) but that’s about 500€ out of the pocket and home assistant setup needs time to actually work with it and to plan things forward. Additionally HA setup could use a floor thermostat or two, some homeESP gadgets and so on, so it needs some money as well.
Majority of the stuff should be taken care of until February, the rest is more or less open.
Right now it’s really just setting up DNScrypt, and maybe swapping some equipment out for lower power consumption.
Nothing fancy but I found an old RPI3 and want to selfhost Vaultwarden and piped on that thing to give my parents a way to watch YouTube without those nasty ads and give them a proper and easy way to store their password. (Over wireguard tunnel)
Also If the universe aligns buy a N100 or 200? To host my own router/switch setup and finally take advantage of my 5Gbit fiber 🫤. I still need to figure out how I get WiFi AP to work with a N100…
Not much but I have a lot other things to figure out but mostly software wise :).
Moving my servers to Arch (EOS) as my trial for one during 2024 was successful, rock solid. Swapping my router to a Unifi Express as I am switching to an ISP which finally allows me to do so.
What is the advantage of an arch based server over Debian ?
I had the unfortunate experience that major upgrades on Debian did break the system twice alreay (different servers though). Doing small, incremental package upgrades seems like less of a risk, I can more easily track major package upgrades.
Also it is my homelab, not a production environment, a place where I try new things and play around. So curiosity is always a reason as to why I do things as well.
Add an NVMe cache to my server and upgrade RAM if pricing permits.
From the software side there are a lot of open feature requests I keep adding to my backlog, like setting up a mail archive, reconfiguring my network (separate IoT devices into separate VLANs), maybe reconfigure some of my containers, …
Finish my migration to my local Kubernetes cluster. Tired of running a mix of vms, docker, and bare metal. I got it setup and a few things, just have to power through.
I also need to bump the drive size in my NAS as I’m running low and want to leverage it more, not less. (Pods use PVs hosted on the NAS over NFS or iSCSI).
And get my offsite backups going again, I had to move this last year and it put a real damper on my goals for last year so there’s a lot of “got the stuff just have to make it work”.
Edit: the UDM Pro is pretty nice. That, a rack and a 2.5G enterprise switch were last year’s acquisitions.
Finally get a cheap mini PC so I can stop running my gaming rig 24/7 for jellyfin. Looking to start self hosting few other services if that goes well.
Same mate.
A relatively newish SBC can run Jellyfin and even do some light transcoding (single stream full HD or 2-3 streams SD).
Any particular spec requirement I would need? There are a lot of them in used market but I am not sure what I need.
Raspberry Pi 4 4GB handled it just fine for me the last couple years.
- Log Monitoring and Collection.
- More storage for my plex/nextcloud servers
- VLANs for my servers.
- Move to K8s
- Better service monitoring
- New server to set devpods up on
