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HomeLab

This is the page, where I overshare about my shitty homelab. Have fun reading all that :3

> Hardware

A quick overview of the hardware in my server (not guaranteed to be up to date):

> History

2021 The beginnings

I’m honestly not sure when I got started with all of this, probably 2021 (when I registered my first domain) or maybe 2022 (based on a timestamp of a photo I found in my gallery). It all began with two Raspberry Pi 3B units. One was running Discord music bots, and the other had an external HDD and hosted a Nextcloud instance using NextcloudPi. Looking back, I’m kind of surprised I didn’t lose any data with that setup

My old HomeLab, hidden behind a cabinet. Leaf for decoration

My old HomeLab, hidden behind a cabinet. Leaf for decoration

2022 More stuff

After learning about Home Assistant and Pi-hole, I wanted to self-host those too. I didn’t have any spare Pis left, so I repurposed an old Trekstor notebook and installed Debian on it. I installed the services "bare metal" – directly on the OS, which isn’t even officially supported by Home Assistant anymore.
The notebook got a USB Ethernet adapter and a permanently attached power cable. I didn't remove that battery, which was (considering the machine) quite the fire hazard

2023 A new home

As more and more services joined my HomeLab, it became impractical to run them on weak standalone machines. So I decided to convert my old PC into a server. It had (after some upgrades) an i7-3770, 20 GB DDR3 RAM, 2x 2 TB HDDs and 2x 240 GB SSDs, all grouped into pools. I chose Unraid as my OS, the demo seemed user-friendly and worked well for me.
Migrating everything was pretty easy, I just set up Nextcloud from scratch. Everything except for HomeAssistant ran in doccker from that point on

2024 Backups!

The RAID on my server doesn’t count as a real backup, so I started building a "proper" backup system.
At first, I used Duplicati to push weekly backups to an old NAS I had lying around at home. As the amount of important data on the server grew, I figured it was time to add a second, off-site backup location. I managed to get another old NAS and set it up at my grandma’s place, including a permanent VPN connection to her network. To save power, I configured a schedule to turn the NAS on only on Sundays for the backups. I also installed a remote power switch in case I ever need to boot it manually.

The prebuilt nas in my grandma's basement

The prebuilt nas in my grandma's basement

Over time, that NAS became unbearably slow. So in June 2025, I decided to build a new one using old parts from the attic. More on that in this Mastodon post :)

The backup server in my grandma's basement

The backup server in my grandma's basement

2025 Another move

With Windows 10 reaching end-of-life, I got lucky and snagged a PC with an i7-7700 :3
While I was still waiting for that machine to arrive, my old network rack decided to just fall off the wall 🥸

My old rack, fallen off the wall

My old rack, fallen off the wall

Given the circumstances, I bought a larger rack that could hold both the server and a UPS. First, I got the EFB WGB-1912GR60 and mounted the network hardware inside.

Someone forgot to order cage nuts?

Someone forgot to order cage nuts?

Soon after, I put the new server into an Inter-Tech 3U-K-340L case (do NOT buy it, it’s awful!). It was then mounted alongside this UPS. Since I reused all drives from the previous system, all I had to do was change the IP address of the new server to match the old one.

Current rack with server and UPS

Current rack with server and UPS

> Services

A selection of services/applications, that I host