Here it is in all its glory. My homelab. 2 proxmox nodes, a N100 based pfSense device, redundant internet conections (Tmobile 5g and Xfinity cable), a managed switch, a WAP and 2 NAS boxes. I run a few publicly facing Wordpress blogs, Nextcloud, Openmediavault, Tracks, Leantime, Grocy, Heimdall, Uptime Kuma, photoprism, Ansible, and a few other things I am forgetting. I also have a third Proxmox node (an HP Z640) off camera that is a sand box server for me.
@louie1961 Welcome to the forums! Hey no home lab is too small! I think this day and time, many are looking for downsizing, not in compute power but in footprint, noise, heat, etc. Great looking lab! Hey what is the hardware you are using for the 2 proxmox nodes? It looks like maybe some mini workstations of some sort possibly? Very cool. I like also that you have a sandbox.
I know @t3hbeowulf also has a sandbox environment and I think that is a super cool way to test and try things without breaking the rest of your lab environment. What are your future plans for it?
Hi Brandon, My main Proxmox node is an HP Elitedesk 800 G9 with an intel i5-12500T, my secondary node is a GMKTek Nucbox G3. The nucbox runs openmediavault and is one of two backup locations for my NAS devices (the other being AWS Glacier). It also runs Ansible for me. All my other services run on the Elitedesk. In my Z640 box, right now I am evaluating the beta of TrueNAS 24, experimenting with Joplin, evaluating Wordpress in an LXC container, evaluating Nextcloud in an LXC container (both as opposed to running them in a VM), and playing with homeassistant. In the near future I plan on evaluating Dashy, Wallabag, Ansible Semaphore, Terraform, Jellyfin and Bitwarden.
@louie1961 awesome stuff! It sounds like you are playing around with all the right technologies! Are you using native backup solutions in the NAS itself or something else? Definitely sounds like you have a really good backup architecture with cold storage in the mix. This is something I need to look closer at myself.
Hi @brandon-lee. I have two NAS boxes. Its probably overkill, but I wanted to keep my highly sensitive personal data, documents, etc. on one VLAN and the data that supports my externally facing web sites on a different VLAN, for the sake of isolation. I really didn't want to punch any holes in my firewall rules to have all of the data sitting in one NAS. Both NAS boxes are mounted as NFS shares in my main Proxmox node. Everything on my internal/trusted VLAN backs up to one NAS and everything that is internet facing (untrusted VLAN) backs up to the other NAS. I just use the backup feature of Proxmox. I haven't started to mess with PBS yet. Those NAS boxes then backup to OMV VMs on the nucbox (rsync). Each VM has its own USB attached drive. Nothing fancy. The NAS boxes also backup to my AWS account (S3 Glacier) using cloud backup tools that came with the system (TOS and DSM). I back up my Wordpress sites every 2 hours, and I keep the last 13 copies plus one daily and one weekly copy. All my other stuff just backs up weekly.
I self host my wife's food blog, so I need lots of backups either to address when she irreparably messes something up (it happens!) or just in case Wordpress gets hacked.
