Starting my Homelab

For years I had ideas for my own Homelab to host my own stuff instead of paying for third party services.

Today I made a start with this idea.

1. Getting the hardware

My old office pc with Intel cpu 4 cores, 8GB RAM, 1TB SSD and a 4TB HDD is my starting device.

With a 1000mbit network interface this will be ok.

Power Usage

I tested the power usage of this PC to see if it’s not too much:

• PC idle = 20 ~ 30 watt
• 100% cpu = 60 ~ 65 watt

Pretty good I would say.

2. Prepare Proxmox USB stick

Downloaded Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment) and put it on a USB stick.

From my Linux Zorin OS desktop I used Gnome Disks (Disks from the start menu) and option “Restore Disk Image…”

(On Windows use Rufus for example.)

3. Check the BIOS

First let’s check the BIOS:

• Choose UEFI
• Enable Virtualization
• Disable Secure Boot
• Date and time

Boot from USB stick and start Proxmox installation.

4. Proxmox installation

Follow instructions, use your favorite AI chat if you have questions.

I chose:

• zfs(raid 0) for first disk only

5. Login proxmox webinterface

Now we can continue on your desktop/laptop.

• Open your browser
• Browse to https://:8006

Welcome to Proxmox :)

First steps:

• Updates > Repositories:
• Disable Enterprise repositories
• Add > No-subscription
• Updates: Upgrade

Why Proxmox?

I want to be able to host multiple servers on this pc => Virtualization

• Migrate a server to another Proxmox pc for easy maintenance
• Quick restore when a server fails
• Proxmox Backup Server for backup procedure

What software am I planning to run?

I want to test with the following software:

• AdGuard Home

  Pi-hole (DNS and DHCP)

• TrueNAS for general File Storage
• Home Assistant + Music Assistant
• Immich for photos (Get rid of Google Photos)
• NextCloud for files (Get rid of Dropbox)
• Jellyfin for video streaming
• Tailscale VPN

  NetBird VPN

• Project NOMAD

The old office PC will not be able to run all of this but we will start anyway.