What are your Homelab goals for 2025?
What are your Homelab goals for 2025?
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?
Probably a hardware upgrade of some kind. The i5-7500 is not cutting it for Minecraft servers with mods and Arma 3 servers, single thread performance is just too slow. So I may grab an i3-14100 or similar and a motherboard and do that swap.
- 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
Part of the *arr stack, to find some obscur films and old series.
I need to transfer my plex server install from my synology NAS to an Intel nuc running plex in docker.
Most important: replace the raspi SD card with an SSD
General hardware: see if I find a better solution than my current Proxmox box (repurposed desktop which consumes 60w idling but is capped to 16GB Ram)
Incoming traffic: currently having a VM that runs nothing but nginx and certbot. Considering switching to another reverse proxy and, more important, get proper monitoring of the logs (e.g. IP detection, 403, etc)
Maybe add some iam like authentik
Finding a solution for selfhosting podcasts client with sync on Android and Linux.. gpodder never really seemed to work, considering audiobookshelf.
Probably setting up calibre web and gethomepage
Keeping what I have and maybe optimize a bit:
- Prometheus stack
- plenty exporters
- Nextcloud
- paperless
- home assistant, mosquitto
- pihole
- vaultwarden
- selfoss
On VPS:
- Mastodon
- Bookwyrm
- some WordPress (want to move this to my homeserver as well)
Got a 3 year old kid with another on the way. I just need it to be reliable so the kid can watch Sesame Street and the lights keep working.
Goals: keep it running
- Install Comms box in office.
- Get Unifi switch.
- Run Cat6A to all rooms of house.
- Consolidate NUC and N100's fewer devices.
- Install 2x U6 Wall units. 6 Begin scoping Surveillance cameras. Torn between Synology and Unifi.
Add some redundancy to it.
Find a way to copy my iCloud files to Nextcloud.
I want to move my whole server to NixOS. It's gotten to the point where I have no idea where all the Ubuntu config files went, and handling half of it via Docker vs baremetal. I hope this will allow me to set up proper backups as well, and maybe get better at Nix! I started a few days ago using the VM feature, but it's tricky to work on for now, perhaps I haven't found the right workflow.
docker-ify everything, my nginx, nextcloud, pihole, jellyfin, and basically everything else is a nightmare and I can't even begin to understand how to modify the shit that
2023 me did2023 chatgpt spat out, so having everything in some neat docker composes is gonna help immenslyalso making the Pi that everything's hosted on boot of an SSD instead of a cheap chinese SD card, but that requires money and I'm all out
Double Storage space (Done!)
Done for the year already!
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.
Considering my boot drive just died, backups. Also wanna get a fractal node 804 and cram tons of HDDs in it. Probably a new build with ecc as well. Perhaps transitioning current server to backup server. Also my directory structure for media is a jumbled mess of incomprehensible nonsense. I should fix that. Also I lost all my torrents that I was uploading but still have the media but can't keep seeding after the drive failure.
I just want jellyfin to organize media properly.
Permissions ok, it detects the fils in the software, then the folders are just empty. I know its my incompetence but been bashing my head against that wall a while.
Certain media categories fix 1 or two podcasts and then other categories break the ones that it fixed.
Naming conventions? Metadata? File types?
One day
I have a dual socket R620 with 256gb RAM that I never turn on (proxmox) and another box with a single xeon 1518d (esxi). Collapsing both down to a repurposed Sophos SG135 (atom c3558) with 32g ram, 512gb sata and a noctua fan (proxmox). I already use another sg135 running opnsense. I run mostly lightweight loads anymore (HomeAssistant, netbox, unifi controller) so I really don't need things turned on that have overkill horsepower. I have a separate file server that I need to upgrade sometime (old 4 core bulldozer amd) but it keeps chugging away.
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.
I think what I need to do correctly on my homelab this year, is setup off-site backups. I currently only backup to seperate drives and machines inside my own home. I need to setup something at my parents place to take weekly and monthly backups.
Other than that, my media server needs a bigger storage drive.
Migrate from Unraid in a massive tower to a proper JBOD rig in a rack. Finally set up ARM SBC k8s cluster for most things alongside the old x86 hardware for a few services and running the NAS as I don't know how I'd hook that up to the SBCs.
Buy a home.
My server is exactly as I need. Basically 1 year old now. This year I really want to do vlans to control the network more than an off the shelf router. I work in tech and still am struggling because all I know is meraki bullshit and that's not priced for the typical home user.
I'll need a few AP's and a switch and firewall. I don't know what to get or what to buy and each research session ends with more options than I started with. Anyway that's my goal. I'll get there eventually.
Moving to a rack is nice, I love my rack. If you’re in or near a city I suggest keeping an eye on Craigslist and ebay (search by distance nearest and lowball ones that have been sitting for months) because it’s not uncommon for nice racks to go real cheap as long as you come get them. I got my rack realllll cheap ($40, 42u, fully enclosed with massive pdu) because it’s a 90s ibm rack and it’s welded steel so it’s like 450lbs. Moving it was a nightmare but it’s real sturdy and I’m never moving it again now that it’s in my basement
For my goals in the short term I have to replace a sas cable that caused a crc error on one drive, it only happened once per smart data but still want to get that done asap. I also have another drive that’s beginning to show some smart issues; it’s on the same sas cable so it may be related because the errors didn’t increase (they all were related to an unclean shutdown, confusing things) but it’s old anyway so better safe than sorry I guess.
Medium term I want to finally upgrade my ups. The one I have now is not a rack mount which is part of what led to the unclean shutdown. It’s also a bit undersized. I have a generator for my house so I don’t need something massive but the one I have is 450va and several years old so with the tired battery I only can get about 5m of runtime. It’s more than enough to cover the transfer from power cutting out to generator power but I want something that’s a bit more reliable in case of generator failure. This is pricey though because my array is pretty huge so it’ll probably be held off unless I find a good deal on a dead one that has cheap batteries available
I also want to put the rack on its own circuit. This is something I should do asap because it’s cheap, just gotta find time and rearrange my panel a bit because it’s pretty full. This would be the other part of the unclean shutdown as the outlet would be in a much better location and I could also install a locking outlet
Would also be nice to pick up a super cheap monitor locally, like something for $15-20 from a pawn shop or Craigslist or something for the rack. Earlier this year I had nginx crash on my server and the webui became inaccessible, I had to drag my nice and kind of large desktop monitor down to the basement to solve the issue, would be nice to just have a shitty small monitor on the rack for that
Speaking of nginx I keep meaning to setup some kind of reverse proxy or mdns for all my dockers so that I can just do whatever.whatever instead ipaddress:3993 which makes my password managers barf but I’ll probably just be lazy and edit my hosts file
Longer term I want to add a secondary low power server that can run something like pfsense to handle my routing, then turn my current wireless routers into access points because they kind of suck as routers.
And of course the array could always be bigger, especially if drive prices fall
I will probably realistically only do the drive and cable replacement, the circuit thing since that’ll be like $40 and a half hour of work, the monitor if I can find one, and maybe the hosts file thing. If I run into cash (unlikely) or a crazy deal (you never know) the ups would be my next priority but there’s a million other things going in life (deductibles just reset for health insurance, hooray)
Right now it's really just setting up DNScrypt, and maybe swapping some equipment out for lower power consumption.
- don't break stuff
- upgrade to microOS from Leap, without violating step 1
- reduce the physical footprint of my server (currently in a massive case, would like to go to mini-ITX)
My city is also planning to roll out fiber, so upgrading my network may become a priority if that happens. My current ISP is limited to 100mbps, but I should be able to get 10gbit once they hook me up (though I'll probably stop well short of that).
Harvester cluster my everything. I really want to play around with having my servers being stationary, a togo cluster (laptops, and UPS in a suit case), and PC all in the same cluster.
Right now they are all segmented rke2 clusters, but Harvester should make running vms way easier too.
Many goals, little time, so we'll see what actually materializes 😅
- Reimplement my Grafana+Loki stack on public cloud, replace Promtail with a proper Prometheus pipeline (queries are making my qnap go brrr)
- Start up an Immich instance and migrate Google photos to it
- Set up Authentik or something equivalent for the aforementioned services and others. I already have a basic Traefik test config without authentication but still don't have it working 100%, so everything stays on TailScale for now
To start - moving services from bare metal to rootless Podman containers running via quadlets. It's something I have had in mind for a while but keep second guessing the distro choice. Long-ish release cadence, systemd-networkd and a recent Podman version in the native repos, well supported, and not Ubuntu.
So far openSUSE Leap seems like the winner. A testing machine is up to install everything, write some deployment scripts, and decide on a storage layout and partitioning scheme.
If anyone has another distro to recommend that checks these boxes let me know!
I like rolling release for the desktop, but only want critical patches in any given month for this server, and a major upgrade no more than every 3-4 years. Or an immutable server distro. But it doesn't seem like networkd is an option for the ones I've looked at (Fedora CoreOS, openSUSE MicroOS), and I am not sure if I want to figure out Ignition/Combustion right now.
Next project - VLANs on Mikrotik.
OP - Navepoint makes good racks for reasonable money. I have a Pro series 9u from them and it went together without any problems. It's on the wall with a pretty big ups in it.
10gb network, a second proxmox host and outside backup
Thank you, I didn’t realize I needed goals
Get everything migrated across to my new k3s cluster. I’ve been using larger boxes (unraid) and a couple of 1L mini PCs with proxmox to run my homelab until now.. but I work with kubernetes and terraform daily and wanted something declarative.
I’ve now got k3s setup with a handful of services migrated (Immich, Tailscale, Nextcloud etc) but there’s still a ton to go (arr suite, various databases, Plex, Tautulli etc). It’s another job entirely.
I love it but sometimes I wonder why I do this to myself 😅
I need to move my mishmash of hard drives, fans, cables, and NUC into a proper NAS box, with a proper power supply and a mini itx motherboard.
- Finish building a mini-rack with a server (almost done).
- Finish cabling the house with CAT6 cables.
- Migrate the current VPS running my docker services to the self-hosted server.
- Implement a NAS on the server using a virtualized OpenMediaVault instance.
- Migrate my network infrastructure from a single asuswrt-merlin router to OPNSense + Cisco Switch.
I just reached all my goals at the end of 2024. So stretch goal in my case.
40 gig network for private ceph traffic. Do aggregation on all the nodes for redundancy. Maybe expand to 5 nodes from 3.
I will be moving my entire homelab to a different country, which currently consist of two kubernetes nodes, a NAS and various home automation devices. I will be scaling down gradually, taking cold storage backups of everything and plan to resurrect everything on new hardware once I have moved.
Last year I wanted to set up a budget media PC and got enamored by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCDmHljsinY
I got a 600 G3 with the 4560 processor, installed Debian onto it and hooked it to my 4k TV mainly to run immich and stremio.
Immich runs just fine, though I have gotten too fast behind its upgrades and having less knowledge about Docker, I'm afraid to update immich. Need to figure that out.
But what disappointed me was that my good quality videos (even the downloaded ones) are choppy to run (unlike the fluid expectations from the video above) and I don't really know what I should look into to make it better.
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
From a hardware perspective I need more storage. Am thinking I'll probably end up with a second Synology NAS unit before the end of the year with 4 hard drives at whatever a reasonable price vs size point it at the time I do it (likely 12-14Tb drives at this stage). Bought drives 2 at a time last time so I'm running two RAID1 pairs right now on the existing unit - adding 4 new drives at once to the home lab will let me move all that content to the new drives and reformat the existing ones into a RAID5 array and get an extra 12Tb of storage.
The one I already have does support adding the 5 drive expansion bay, but figuring that with a second NAS I can move some of my Docker instances currently running on a dedicated laptop onto the second NAS which takes one computer out of the setup as well.
Maintenance wise I've just only done my 2024 maintenance stuff that I do each year. This year it was going through my password vault and making sure everything was synced up, had complex passwords, had two factor enabled where applicable, etc, as well as setting up unique email addresses for every service I'm using (they just forward to the same inbox) to help me track who's been selling my info. Have already found a local fast food outlet who has from that.
Have also rotated all my SSH keys, made sure they were all upgraded to Ed25519 from RSA, set up unique keys for the three devices I regularly use so I can revoke one individually if required, made sure all my hardware was running the latest updates (my RPi running my Pi-hole instance was still on Buster so I had to get that updated before I could even update Pi-hole), etc.
Also swapped my Mullvad connection on my gateway to use Wireguard instead of OpenVPN since they're dropping support later this year.
Honestly I'd love to invest in some sort of rack mounting for home, its something I should look into some more, but right now I just have a whole section of the wardrobes in my study for equipment and tech storage. It's working for now although I worry about it in summer with not a massive amount of heat dissipation in there. This weekend is supposed to be close to 40 degrees Celsius both days 🥵
Finalise my physical network to have at least one available port in every essential room & build a new home server/NAS.
Hardware-wise:
- Reorganize my networking closet and rack up my switches
- Replace my core switch with 10 gbit, connect up 10Gbit fiber to my laptop dock and one of my nodes still on copper
- Add 3 more nodes to my cluster with nvme storage so that I can start an erasure-coding pool in ceph.
Software wise, too many projects to count lol
I'm still in the middle of a K8s migration. It's overkill for a home user, but I want the upskilling.
I've got a QNAP NAS with self-managed linux for storage, and a MS-01 with an RTX A2000 for compute. They're connected over 10Gb SFP+. I'm more than half way done, especially considering I mostly know what I'm doing now.
I still need to figure out the idiomatically right way to schedule pods with their storage, but I got GPU workloads going recently. Next up is migrate the last of the docker-compose from the storage node.
Rebuilding my main router to work with 10gbe fiber that recently became available here. Although it is a tad expensive, so I am not actually sure yet if I will upgrade my contract.
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.
I am doing exactly the same as what the OP is doing. In addition to that, I will unify my beelink mini PC proxmox server and our old Intel atom NAS into one rack server with AMD EPYC, proxmox and truenas in a VM.
I sure hope our landlord and the Internet operator can agree on the operator finally bringing fiber cables to all apartments. Then I would have fast enough uplink to my homelab.
Loving all these goals and ideas!
Lots to think about and put on the to do list!
Great question and I'm loving the action.
All I need to figure out is how to replicate one trunas pool to another trunas machine as a backup.
replication tasks are all failing, rsync is taking absolutely forever, and I need my backup, I feel naked!
I'm due a backup and other than that I hope nothing breaks
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, …
- Setup my two offsite backups at work and family home.
- Decide if I want more storage or to start deleting some media.
- Setup a work server.
- Something fun?
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.
Move from Ubuntu to Debian and add more cameras to frigate.
I'm designing a modular rack shelf mounted 3D printed server case. I hope to finish it by moving my backup server to the new case.
I want to move my 4x SFP+ from their current MicroTik switch to my new Brocade. Then I'm very strongly debating running both VM and Ceph over the same 10Gbps connections, removing the ugly USB Ethernet dongles from my three Proxmox Lenovo M920q boxes.
After that? Maybe look at finally migrating Vault off my ClusterHat to Kubernetes.
At some point I need to migrate off Hyper-V. Probably to Proxmox.
Ugh. I don’t wanna.
I want to improve my notifications. With that I mean emails coming from the server when updates are available when something happens during my rsync backup routines or just when they are completed and so on. Right now I don't really know when something is happening just when the server is not working anymore.
Really a few things. What I am looking to do is create a highly dynamic system where I can easily deploy something by kicking off some automation. To do this I am first creating a base Ceph shared filesystem. This will be mounted in all VMs so that I can use Ansible to quickly spin up Docker containers via docker compose. This will make it much easier to dynamically create resources and services since I won't need to worry about all the underlying components. I simply kick off the automation for any changes. I already have the automation to create new VMs.
I'm currently saving up to buy a fractal design node 804 to build a NAS with 4 drives within. Also trying to create some more reliable backups using said NAS.
@Sunny
Backup, Tailscale, Authentik