I went in thinking that maybe there's something to learn for my grand total of 1 ThinkCentre M910q "homelab", but this author's setup is on another league, I'm sure closer (or surpassing) the needs of a small/medium company!
I second the shout out for Mealie, it's very useful. Importing from URLs works very well, and it gives you a centralised place for all your recipes, without ads or filler content and safe from linkrot.
My most recent learning - DDR4 ECC UDIMMs are comically expensive. To the point where I considered just replacing the entire platform with something RDIMM rather than swapping to ECC sticks.
>No space left on device.
>In other words, you can lock yourself out of PBS. That’s… a design.
Run PBS in LXC with the base on a zfs dataset with dedup & compression turned off. If it bombs you can increase disk size in proxmox & reboot it. Unlike VMs you don't need to do anything inside the container to resize FS so this generally works as fix.
>PiHole
AGH is worth considering because it has built in DoH
>Raspberry Pi 5, ARM64 Proxmox
Interesting. I'm leaning more towards k8s for integrating pis meaningfully
Don’t do K8s on Pis. The Pis will spend the majority of their horsepower running etcd, CNI of choice, other essential services (MetalLB, envoy, etc). You’ll be left with a minimal percentage of resources for the pods that actually do things you need outside the cluster.
And don’t get me started on if you intend to run any storage solutions like Rook-Ceph on cluster.
Maybe I just got lucky, but a year ago or so I managed to find Kingston 32GB DDR4 ECC UDIMM's from Amazon for a price that was more or less identical to normal non-ECC RAM. Running a Ryzen system with 128gb of memory now.
One of my favorite CyberPower perks is their RMCARDs for network monitoring: It's a separate module that works in basically all of their rackmount UPSes. You can replace the entire UPS without having to pay for the little mini web server again, it'll just pop right into the new unit.
I've recently learned that "homelab" is a specific thing meaning you run certain software (like Proxmox), and not a generic term for running a 'server lab' at home.
People might gatekeep it, but in my opinion if it is YOUR fault the TV won't play the show, you've a homelab; if it's the ISP or streaming service's fault, then you don't have a homelab.
I just learned about the whole homelab thing a week ago; it's a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected. I'm planning to setup ProxMox today for the first time in fact and retire my Ubuntu Server setup running on a NUC that's been serving me well for last couple years.
I hadn't heard about mealie yet, but sounds like a great one to install.
I've had a ton of fun with CasaOS in the past few months. I don't mind managing docker-compose text files, but CasaOS comes with a simple UI and an "App Store" that makes the process really simple and doesn't overly-complicate things when you want to customize something about a container.
I can vouch for Mealie. My wife and I run it locally for family recipes and to pull down recipes from websites. I have a DNS ad blocker running, but most recipe sites are still a mess to navigate on mobile.
You can also distill recipes down. I find a lot of good recipes online that have a lot of hand-holding within the steps which I can just eliminate.
As others have said, Mealie is an excellent app for any homelab. My wife and I use the meal planning feature and connect it to our Home Assistant calendar that is displayed on a wall-mounted tablet. The ingredient parsing update is amazing and being able to scale recipes up/down is such a time saver.
Not sure I understand the need to use a Raspberry Pi here. They're cool and all, but wouldn't a regular old PC be simpler to setup, maintain, and attach hardware to? It's a hobby--and you can do whatever you want, but I wouldn't involve a Pi in a home server setup unless I specifically needed something it bought me, like the small form factor, low power usage, GPIO pins and so on.
For my home archive NAS boxes, Proxmox is just a Debian distro with selective (mostly virtualization) things more up to date, and has ZFS and a web UI out of the box.
I disable the high availability stuff I don’t use that otherwise just grinds away at disks because of all the syncing it does.
It has quirks to work through, but at this point for me dealing with it is fairly simple, repeatable and most importantly, low effort/mental overhead enough for my few machines without having to go full orchestration, or worse, NixOS.
The best thing I did for my homelab is unplug the raspberry pis and throw them into the crate of no-longer-used-but-wont-throw-away electronics. Switching to an ancient tower PC with on paper poorer specs significantly improved performance and reliability across the board and no more weird issues due to SD cards and flaky network. No worries about causing a house fire with sketchy power supplies. No having to make compromises to make it work like a regular PC with using external drives and no difficulty finding compatible software. Pis are amazing little devices, but my experience from the first gen to v4 is that they are temporary solutions or for use cases that don't have high reliability needs. Just buy a cheap mini PC for the same price and you have so many more options and benefits from the get go.
> ignore current warnings - I’m using a MacBook Pro charger + cable and still got the warning that I need a 5V/5A PSU.
You need to be careful with this one.
The USB spec goes up to 15W (3A) for its 5V PD profiles, and the standard way to get 25W would be to use the 9V profile. I assume the Pi 5 lacks the necessary hardware to convert a 9V input to 5V, and, instead, the Pi 5 and its official power supply support a custom, out-of-spec 25W (5A) mode.
Using an Apple charger gets you the standard 15W mode, and, on 15W, the Pi can only offer 600mA for accessories, which may or may not be enough to power your NVMe. Using the 25W supply, it can offer 1.6A instead, which gives you plenty more headroom.
I don't understand some home labs. You see a beefy, but old rack server that has next to none single-thread performance (relatively). Usually servery underutilized un running Proxmox (issa lab after all) and RPi doing something for some reason?
Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill.
Sometimes it's people running 2-3 node k8s cluster to run a few static workloads. You're not going to learn much about k8s from that, but you will waste CPU cycles on running the infra.
> You see, unlike Debian or other standard OS, Raspberry Pi OS (which I still call Raspbian in my head and likely use in this article multiple times) is designed to be flashed to the SD card directly and doesn’t actually have an installer that can be booted from USB
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 54.1 ms ] thread>No space left on device.
>In other words, you can lock yourself out of PBS. That’s… a design.
Run PBS in LXC with the base on a zfs dataset with dedup & compression turned off. If it bombs you can increase disk size in proxmox & reboot it. Unlike VMs you don't need to do anything inside the container to resize FS so this generally works as fix.
>PiHole
AGH is worth considering because it has built in DoH
>Raspberry Pi 5, ARM64 Proxmox
Interesting. I'm leaning more towards k8s for integrating pis meaningfully
And don’t get me started on if you intend to run any storage solutions like Rook-Ceph on cluster.
You know when you know.
I hadn't heard about mealie yet, but sounds like a great one to install.
The Proxmox Backup Server is the killer feature for me. Incremental and encrypted backups with seamless restoration for LXC and VMs has been amazing.
You can also distill recipes down. I find a lot of good recipes online that have a lot of hand-holding within the steps which I can just eliminate.
I don’t get why people use VMs for stuff when there’s docker.
Thanks!
I disable the high availability stuff I don’t use that otherwise just grinds away at disks because of all the syncing it does.
It has quirks to work through, but at this point for me dealing with it is fairly simple, repeatable and most importantly, low effort/mental overhead enough for my few machines without having to go full orchestration, or worse, NixOS.
You need to be careful with this one.
The USB spec goes up to 15W (3A) for its 5V PD profiles, and the standard way to get 25W would be to use the 9V profile. I assume the Pi 5 lacks the necessary hardware to convert a 9V input to 5V, and, instead, the Pi 5 and its official power supply support a custom, out-of-spec 25W (5A) mode.
Using an Apple charger gets you the standard 15W mode, and, on 15W, the Pi can only offer 600mA for accessories, which may or may not be enough to power your NVMe. Using the 25W supply, it can offer 1.6A instead, which gives you plenty more headroom.
Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill.
Sometimes it's people running 2-3 node k8s cluster to run a few static workloads. You're not going to learn much about k8s from that, but you will waste CPU cycles on running the infra.
300 are a lot of watts. ...I didn't used to pay attention but power costs keep rising.
I recently opted for a i7 F (65w base) over an i7 K (125w base) even with the 15% performance hit.
https://github.com/gitbls/sdm
can help with this issue.
Both the "Hacker" and "Cheap Bastard" ethos are better served by ... just about any cheap x86 stuff--especially used.
What am I missing?
...turns out you don't need local storage at all: if you already run a NAS you can bootp the RasPi over the network!
This also makes backups super easy.