Almost a year of homelabbing

I didn’t really think about AeroNook’s anniversary (as a website/server) until now. I’m early, but looking back at how things have drastically changed is good, both as a lesson and potentially influence others to try what I am doing too!

The beginning

I’ve been eyeing the idea of home servers for a while, always curious to try out the software and hardware that many homelabs run on. As people say - you don’t need to get new equipment to try a hobby or to instantly get good at something, your existing/old equipment will suffice. This advice applies to photography, content creation and hell, servers/homelabs!

Last year, I’ve got a free desktop PC (now known as Australis) that was supposed to be thrown out, but needed its data securely wiped - thankfully, I was allowed to keep it. At the time I didn’t know what I’ll do with it besides having hardware to mess around with, at some point I tried out CasaOS on Arch Linux (and learnt an important cybersec lesson, having a firewall, oops), but some time later, one of my friends introduced me to YunoHost, a Debian-based distro that has a web frontend for self-hosting your own services/apps. Despite it being complicated to set up on 2 drives, it was neat, until I noticed its limitations with what I can host.

Moving to Proxmox

I don’t exactly remember how I got curious about it, I know my school has been pushing Proxmox as a free VMware vSphere/ESXi option that happened to also have a huge homelab community around it, meaning - getting support or setting things up was a piece of cake, especially when I was first starting out. Proxmox is a lot more complex than YunoHost, as it’s geared mainly for businesses/enterprises, where Proxmox features really shine at. YunoHost provided a simple interface with an “app store”, while Proxmox doesn’t really have anything close to it.

Thankfully with forums, YouTube tutorials, trial and error, I managed to set up things and some features I really don’t need (yet) on a school “lab”. This (and my Arch Linux experience) helped to get my hands dirty with the software and freedom or flexibility of self-hosting applications that YunoHost didn’t offer back then - I got a Minecraft server and file server running!

Goodbye, WordPress.

I thought WordPress was neat, it’s somewhat as simple as Wix/Google Sites, but you owned your own instance of it instead of it being hosted by someone else, somewhere. I managed to get a pretty basic “mini-blog” running and had a link to my file server, if I remember correctly. But because it’s a popular self-hosted blogging platform, there are also a ton of security problems, especially considering recent controversies, I had been looking for alternatives. Ghost is very similar in terms of simplicity, but I couldn’t get it running for some reason, though it didn’t stop me from trying alternatives, of which I’ve settled on Zola.

Zola is neat since if you’re used to MarkDown (like on Discord or GitHub), you’ll feel right at home writing blogs with the same formatting as other platforms, plus, Duckquill and Ametrine are very neat! If you’re setting up a web server, I recommend checking out Zola with Ametrine, as Duckquill is an older project.

From Australis, to Fermi, to Nova.

This is a whole mess, full of ambitions and harsh realities, let’s start from each homelab solution I’ve used and what I am trying to figure out for the future.

Australis

Just as I mentioned above, it was my first ever proper homelab that I tried both YunoHost and Proxmox, which is fine, but as I did hardware upgrades, it became better but also introduced new flaws on top of existing flaws:

  • Increased power draw (going from an iGPU and Pentium to GTX 1050 and i5-4430)
  • Older components - higher chances of hardware failure (I almost had the motherboard die on me!)
  • Loud’ish hum (I could sleep through it, but it’s still worth pointing out!)
  • Not all that compact…

I remember mentioning Australis Jr. and other variants where it may get a new mobo, more storage or even an all-Ryzen setup, but that would be too expensive and simply not worth it, especially with 50 watt power draw…

Fermi

It was my own, first ever laptop that also fell apart in recent years. While compact and the most power efficient, it’s also not ideal, though served as a decent backup server!

  • Older hardware - Core i3-3227U
  • Very little memory - 4GB DRR3 SODIMM (it has 8GB, the other 4GB were used in another laptop)
  • Only one HDD, no dual-drive solution (there is an mSATA port, but I’ve never bought an SSD for it)
  • Fan bearing sounds like a VW 1.9 TDi engine (and can’t be relubed)

Nova

My current homelab, a Dell OptiPlex Micro is much more modern and the size of an Intel Mac mini! It’s mostly ideal, just…

  • Needs a new fan or relubrication, it sounds pretty bad now though sometimes knocking on the computer can knock the noise down a little bit!
  • Would be nice to have a second SATA drive connector, I already have 1 M.2 for the Proxmox boot drive and 1 SATA HDD, but having a 2nd SATA would be nice for higher demand services…

What does the future hold?

I really don’t have a clear path, I might slowly expand if I need more out of Nova, but at the moment, it’s good!