Homelab Tour

[@selfhosted]

Great to see more people getting into the homelab/selfhosting space. Great video!

[@sytriz]

Thanks! Early beginnings for me lol!

[@basix250]

Mad respect for reusing all of your older PCs into servers ;)

[@safaros38]

Lmao when he said "But this won't last much longer I want to build an overkill system" literally me a few years ago. Started with a single cheap dell server w/ same router running openwrt and now I have a threadripper, I barely know how to use it fully, but god I love. Overkill server never dissapoints :)

[@davidsun9026]

Great video. You got a knack for making videos. I stumbled across your channel cause I was looking at a bunch of home lab stuff for ZFS and 100Gbps home networking. Keep documenting your journey and growing. You have a bright future in IT if you want to go down this path.

[@Sahta99]

Just to let you know that immich didn't transfer to a payed model, it just transfered to a donation model of some sort. It's still open source. Check Louis Rossman videos regarding this and you will see there's nothing to be worried about

[@sytriz]

Gotcha! I will watch that. I'm happy to hear that because I really like Immich's image location features and lots of its other niceties that Nextcloud photos doesn't have.

[@Mikey-Plays-Bass]

@@sytriz I second Rossman as a GREAT source for very useful information regarding data independence and EULA's.

[@Mikey-Plays-Bass]

This is great content! I have something similar to what you are shooting for, but also is about to undergo some revisions. I’m 48 now, and I’ve learned that as soon as a project is complete, it’s due for revisions. 😂 I’m running proxmox on a HP mini elite G3 800 with a 1TB internal ssd, 1TB SSD in a USB-C caddy, and two 2TB WD passports. Oh and 24GB ddr4. Use what ya got. That’s the home lab way. 😂

[@sytriz]

That's the fun of it, there's always something to work on and it is never done! also I love the resourcefulness :)

[@charleswheatcroft]

That's really useful - thanks for spending your time doing this!

[@imtotallyjustin]

Brilliant video, definately given me some ideas for things I can implement. Looking forward to seeing your upgraded setup following best practices :)

[@m6.]

great video, will def have to try out some of the things you're running on your homelab

[@brigadierwilliamwildebeest1112]

Great video Chief. I love your detailed breakdown. Sadly my Minisforum MS-01 (12900H) mini pc I bought in May died a few days ago☹️. I used it as a Proxmox server I hosted my gns3 server , phpipam, and other containers on.

[@sytriz]

Thanks man! R.I.P. your mini PC... wish you the best of luck eventually re-configuring everything eventually.

[@Lunolux]

welcome to homelabing nice video

[@noz3m]

great video and explanation, love it. Looking forward to your future homelab videos

[@sytriz]

Thanks man, I really appreciate it!

[@noz3m]

@@sytriz im running a i3 6th gen with 13gb ram on proxmox for homeassitant. And one i7 4th gen with 2x1tb drive and 1 250gb ssd, currently running casa os. Looking to see what fits my needs and how to go about the hardware and configuration.

[@lifeasben643]

Great video. Always fun to see what others have setup. It's a bit cleaner setup than mine... May have to do a homelab tour but there won't be much time looking at the pictures lol.

[@sytriz]

Thanks haha, mine isn't too pretty either! Good luck on doing the tour!!

[@abowers]

Great little homelab on two machines. I've been trying to condense some of my 4u and 2u servers in my rack down to all these amazing Mini PC's that are coming out these days. Currently running an unRaid host, two debian hosts, a ubuntu host

[@sytriz]

Thanks! It really is crazy how powerful mini PCs are getting these days, the high spec ones can host a surprising amount of stuff! Just wondering, are you transitioning to them for power reasons? or just space? Maybe it's just because I haven't had a proper rack and rack mounted servers yet. But I see the "coolness factor" being way higher with a proper rack and full sized servers. That is what I'm planning on doing when I redo my homelab. I'd love to have a massive rack and blinking lights in my house haha

[@howling-wolf]

funfact the destination in nginx reverse proxy manager can also be the docker container names as long as they resolve on your network (which they do in a default setup)

[@sytriz]

Didn't know that, thanks for the tip!

[@eondivine]

Great stuff mate! I’ve just started to build my own homelab and would love to hear what you have learned and what you would like to change.

[@sytriz]

Thank you, I wish you the best of luck on your homelab journey! And once I get my new lab started I will probably create a video or blog post behind why I changed the things I did.

[@luigitech3169]

Great! I subscribed to your rss feed for selfhosting

[@sytriz]

Thank you! I appreciate it.

[@allendavis259]

Great video dude. I am in the early stages, running docker on a bare metal debian server off an old laptop with some usb drives plugged into it. Full on janky. Theres lots if want to redo and like you said new hardware will probably be the push to get going. With Immich is there any compression algorithms like Google Photos has? I'm hovering around 250k photos mostly done by my wife and GPhotos has the image saver quality which she uses to save space (non-professional photos) and that be a nice feature if eventually I rebuild with redundancy etc.

[@sytriz]

Thanks! We all work with what we have haha, that's the best way to learn. For Immich, I am honestly not sure about compression. But there is a lot of settings you can fine tune to your liking. Since it is on your own storage, I see no reason why there would be compression algorithms to save space, and if there were I would assume you could disable it.

[@markos9644]

This is fire!! You should do a video on how you would set it up now if you could redo it

[@sytriz]

Thanks man! Once I start re-configuring everything I'll definitely touch on that.

[@seansingh4421]

If you want convenience, like easy asf homelab, go with unraid. If you want anything resembling performance however then….don’t

[@ChadenStephens-g6w]

Love the video! Recently started to get into Homelab and Selfhosting stuff. Been having fun! What did you use to create the logical diagram? I've been using Paint and just want to see if anything better exists haha

[@sytriz]

Happy to hear you're getting into the hobby too! For the diagram, I used draw.io. It is free with online and downloadable versions. Better than Visio in my opinion, and I'm use it is MUCH better than MS paint haha!

[@florianbrandstetter7450]

using network shares instead of directly mounting has its benefits. networkshares can handle concurrent access from multiple VMs and LXCs. directly mounting a harddrive in proxmox is preferred when only a single VM or LXC should have access. Btw you can change the bootorder of your openmediavault vm to start before all the other ones to avoid mounting issues. I set up everything on one machine because I have higher electricy cost where i live. All the things you mentioned i have on one docker host. Any reason why you have your media server stuff in seperate LXCs. would like to know :)

[@sytriz]

Understood. I was convinced that I could make a ZFS share in Proxmox and pass it through to multiple guests allowing simultaneous access to the storage? I will have to look into this more. But I do know you cannot do this when straight up directly passing through a drive, not in a ZFS pool. I did end up finding out about the GUI implementation of modifying the boot order after making a crontab bash scrip to only start the other VMs after OMV was running. And the main reason for having both docker containers and LXC's is just because I wanted to try both out. To be honest, I kind of like LXC containers better because they show up more directly in Proxmox instead of having to go through another VM. But, it is nice to still have the docker host around if I'm hosting a service I can only find a docker compose file for, and no proxmox helper script.

[@AnoshterHaar]

Nice! I do hope you take care of backing up your data as you do not run any raid array. For me that just feels like playing with fire as hard drives will fail eventually. It's not the question if it fails, but when. Running raid can be expensive (although just a cheap second drive would be way more secure than no raid) so I get why you might run on a single stripe. But be aware that if a drive or even a satacable fails, it could mess up your entire system. And if you do not run frequent backups, your gonna wish you did. Especially as you run some critical apps like vaultwarden, which is probably quite important to get acces to a lot of other stuff. Back up!! Also when running raid ofcourse...

[@sytriz]

I like to live life on the edge haha! It is mainly just movies and stuff on there that isn't important. But I do really need to setup an array here eventually. Didn't think of how having my passwords stored on a single drive might be a bad idea.... thanks for pointing that out! Luckily though, that's on an SSD at least, but it could still fail.

[@AnoshterHaar]

@@sytriz Yeah I get it. I myself am the opposite haha, probably a bit overprotective... Yeah ssd's generally have lower failrates. But keep in mind that the weakpoint of an ssd is it's amount of writing that is possible and a server application will often write a lot of little bits of data all throughout the day. I did recently have to replace my Truenas boot ssd as it was completely bricked. It was a 64gb ssd and the oldest ssd I had. I remember I paid a lot for only 64 gigs back in the day. So it had seen quite some writes and had no trim... Luckily Truenas is very modular and had it up and running in no time with the backed up configuration file. But things like passwords and one-of-a-kind files deserve some redundancy I believe :) And again just using a pair of cheap 500 gig hard drives already gives more redundancy for a drive failure than just one! Or just copy all important bits to an external drive or cloud every couple of months. Works too!

[@rhm54]

Great work!

[@howyoudoin2069]

Great video. Got my sub. Very similar to my journey but better. So I got a heap of top tips. Cheers.

[@sytriz]

Thank you, I really appreciate it!

[@Flackon]

That’s the first time I’ve heard someone say “pterodactyl” with a silent T instead of a silent P

[@sytriz]

I was today years old when I realized I have been saying that wrong my whole life.... thank you for pointing this out haha

[@matthiashavrez]

can you show how you setup the domain names / revers eproxy ? Have you thought about using Tailscale or Netbird ?

[@sytriz]

I may potentially make videos on this in the future. When I originally implemented it these are the two resources I used: addicted2tech has a playlist titled "Raspberry Pi Series" on KZbin. He does a great job going over how DDNS with cloudflare works and how it integrates with the reverse proxy manager. For the non-pi specific stuff for hosting NGINX proxy manger (because I wan't using a raspberry pi) I followed a KZbin tutorial by DB Tech (Alkamai Dev channel) titled "Connect Your Docker Containers to Domain Names For Easy Access using Portainer on Linode" I've not heard of Netbird, I'll have to check that out. To my understanding, Tailscale is just an easy-to-setup VPN? I already use OpenVPN setup through my netgear router, so I haven't messed with it yet.

[@KM-sv4dh]

Great video, would you please provide a link for hosting GNS/CML, I'm interested in remotely hosting my own lab so I can access it wherever i am, not just when I'm home. Also, can you remotely access the GUI of that mint VM?

[@sytriz]

Thank you! For GNS3, there's a video by Divgitally ("GNS3 server setup on Proxmox"), it's pretty simple. For CML, I followed Jeremy's IT Lab guide because I use his course for my CCNP. Only catch with CML is that if you actually want configure devices you need to pay $200 annually for the Cisco virtual firmware versions. If you're specifically focused on Cisco like me and you want to setup a lab for free, I'd recommend GNS3. But even then you still need to obtain the virtual firmware versions for network devices. I was able to get them from my work, but, I'm sure there's other sketchy ways to get the firmware for free without paying. But it is very nice being able to access the lab environment externally hosting it on a server like this VS running a type-2 hypervisor on a workstation. For the Mint VM, I'm just using the default Proxmox console VNC thing. It's there by default if you setup any VM in proxmox under the console tab. Usually I have no problems with it, but I can probably just re-create the VM to fix it. There's nothing important on it, just for testing. If it were working yes, I could port forward the Proxmox web UI and access it remotely therefor, I could see everything on the Mint desktop too. If I were using it more it would be way more elegant to setup a proper VNC connection instead of using the built-in Proxmox one though.

[@enigmacarpc55]

Hello great video. I am still stuck on getting Openwrt with OpenVPN setup. I use the helper scripts to create the Openwrt and can add the OpenVPN client but I am confused with the interfaces and how to have my LXC connect through the VPN. Any clarity on how you did it or could you make a video? A lot of people will start heading in this direction as LXC keeps getting more and more popular. Thanks

[@sytriz]

Thanks! Lookup "Must-Have OpenWrt Router Setup For Your Proxmox" by Novaspirit Tech, he does a great job explaining this process. One thing to note is that some parts of the VPN configuration (like authenticating) are VPN-provider specific. For example, he used PIA, and I used Torguard, so I was on my own to figure out how Torgaurd's keys worked.

[@CosminRodriguez]

Hey mate, can you please tell me about how you made that diagram with all your routers/servers and the services youre running? I would love to have something similar for my mini homelab to keep my things organized and know exactly what im hosting and where

[@sytriz]

I used draw.io, you can use it online and it's even available in most linux package managers. Imo, it's better than Microsoft Visio (having used both) Also, it's nice when you have it all mapped out. Before making this diagram for the video I didn't even really know what my architecture looked like or remembered which services were on which server under what host.

[@CosminRodriguez]

@@sytriz thank you so much!

[@Psikeomega]

So to be at risk of sounding like a fanboy, do a little research into docker. Even if you dont wind up using it at home, it is a good stepping stone to learning kubernetes. I personally have a wide variety of hoasting strategies depending on what exactly it is im hoasting. But it not uncommon for me to run some LXC containers with a few different docker compose stacks (did I mention docker compose? Its also a good thing to learn after you learn docker CLI, changed my life). What im running for hardware is a used dell t7600 workstation as my windows server (yeah ew, I know, but i have a 2022 licence) but im starting to move away from that. Its a dual E5 20xx V1 Xeon machine with 256gb ram. Dell claims it also runs V2 xeons but Ive yet to find V2 cpus that work in it. I also have a dell R720 server running proxmox, its the defacto standard of the home datacenter. Dual xeon E5 V2 with 2 tesla M40 GPUs, 384 gb ram. I also have a dell c6200 4 node blade server. Its been sitting in yhe corner waiting for me to learn kubernetes because thats what I want to use it for. Other than that I have many several cheap computers that I use with ProxMox for other odds and ends that are clustered back to my r720 and will pick up other services (high availability) if something goes down or crashes. Network is a PfSence box for my router firewall, a cisco catalyst 2900 series gigabit switch (with POE) half a mile of cat 5 and 6, and any junk wifi routers incould find in access point mode that im getting read to set up with RADIUS authentication. So my advice, since i used to work in E waste when I was starting in IT (I was their help desk guy for a while) look at used junk and get stuff as cheap as possible. Your wallet will thank you and you will be surprised what people are getting rid of.

[@steaders82]

Great video but can you make it more zoomed in please

[@surajthakkar]

why move to intel xeon on epyc? wont it consume lot of power?

[@jarman365]

🏴‍☠RRR stack is for Linux distros like Hannah Montana Linux or Justin Bieber Linux 🤣

[@sytriz]

Absolutely! I only use it for torrenting free and open source linux ISOs and that is all...

[@doce3609]

I'd love to know how much electricity these guys (or just one of them) needs. (Not your bill directly, but the Watts or Kilowatts so that I can calculate what something like that would cost me where i am located)

[@sytriz]

I would also like to know those stats. Energy is really cheap by me, so I don't really pay attention to it. And I'd say my electric bill is pretty standard. I don't imagine the servers are using too much power because they're both just low-end desktops. But who knows, maybe I'd be surprised.

[@McGregorMX]

I run a dell r720 and an md1200 jbod, those 2 use about 440 watts. The entire setup (including switches and small computers for network stuff) pulls about 500.

[@sytriz]

@@McGregorMX I would say that isn't bad at all considering a high-end GPU alone can pull like 300 watts these days.

[@lifeasben643]

I suspect my home lab is pulling about 400w total. That's a Core2Quad, 2x 2nd Gen i5, and a 7th Gen i5. In the process of shifting things around since I really need to get rid of that Core2Quad and maybe one of the 2nd Gen machines.

[@Celian-f3p]

hey, people can help me for my homelab, i need help please