What’s up, what’s down and what are you not sure about?
Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.
I finally finished my first iteration of my Minilab including a very smooth migration from the old server yesterday so I can go to the service side of things again. I plan to get some kind of selfhosters VPN for external access to stuff that’s not exposed to the internet, I’ll have to investigate which one.
My biggest shortcoming at the moment is my NAS is also my gaming PC. It’s pretty inefficient to have that on all the time. But I haven’t had the time to build a dedicated NAS.
I’m putting together a pretty simple one this week. Got a used HP Elitedesk G4 SSF for around $150, already have 2 8TB external drives lying around that are easy enough to shuck and slap into it. Should be pretty easy to just slap TrueNAS Scale onto it, set up a mirror with the 2 drives, and be good to go for a while.
I’ll definitely need more space down the road and this thing can’t fit more than 2 drives without some modifications (3 is doable, but 4 will take some 3D printed parts which I believe someone’s still working on fine-tuning). But it’s good enough for me for now, still got 2.5TB I’m not using.
If I thought about storage a bit more before starting this project, I probably would’ve just gotten the same SSF but with some slightly better specs to use as the entire server, rather than running 2 different machines, but oh well.
Yeah I had your idea back when I wanted a nas. I didn’t have the time and just bought a synology knowing it wasn’t the best option and was aware of the possibility of enshitification. Now that they’ve enshitified, I can’t really recommend them any longer. So far it’s been good but I’m still looking for options that are quick and easy to set up. Or maybe I’ll grit my teeth and start building one from scratch.
I’m perfectly happen to build my own NAS with NixOS and ZFS on it. I think it’s mostly a matter of getting the right hardware.