Why I started this
I have had a small plex server for long time that contained some movies and shows I owned. I had also been pretty acustom to hosting Minecraft servers and other game servers when I wanted to play with friends. Outside of that I hadn’t really considered doing much else.
I think becuase I used to program in my spare time but now I’m a software engineer I don’t want to do that when I get home I found a fun hobby in the infrastucture side of setting up a home lab with existing services. Needless to say I have become a bit obsessed.
I have had to restart the entire process about 3 times now. But it has been worth it!
Version 1.0 - Windows 10 😞
I had an old desktop I was no longer using. It was still a nice desktop I may refer to the desktop as Theseus as I’ve had this desktop for over 10 years and every component has been replaced save the case so it’s named as a reference to the ship of Theseus.
| Processor information | AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor, 12 cores |
|---|---|
| Memory | 32 GiB DDR4 |
| Disk space | 3 TiB |
| I decided to use that as a server for a program I was working on. I also moved my Minecraft server over to it as up to this point it was just running on a laptop now called Hermes as I am sticking with that Greek theme. But with window updating frequently and the computer rebooting all the time I decided to start fresh. |
Version 2.0 - Ubuntu Server 😐
I backed up what information I wanted and installed Ubuntu on Theseus. I knew I wanted to explore containerization as that’s not something I’ve had much experience with. This is where I started adding more services. So on this iteration over a couple of months I had:
- Authentik - as a single signon option
- Bookstack - for documentation
- Dashy - as a dashboard
- Home Assistant - For home automation
- Minecraft and Enshrouded Servers
- Ollama AI - For playing with local AI
- Plex - For me media
- Vaultwarden - For local password management.
- Nextcloud - for cloud storage and even photo backup.
There were some other things as well to help manage stuff but those were my main points of focus.
This still didn’t give me everything I was wanting for I wanted more control over virtualization.
Version 3.0 - Proxmox 😊
I ended up once again backing up the server and installing something new on the hardware. This time it was Proxmox to use for spinning up and down containers and VMs as I wanted. This also have me less points of failure as apposed to before where all those containers from above were running on the same OS. It also gives me easy control over backups as I can create them within Proxmox and store them on a NAS. I initially setup things very similar to how I did before creating an Ubuntu VM and restoring all the applications from the backup. I’ve since pulled a lot of those applications into their own containers to have less points of failure.
