Personal Homelab

Revised my homelab through the winter break to use Proxmox VE hypervisor and TrueNAS scale. Along with that, a full-blown self-hosted environment for streaming owned shows.

Updated my homelab throughout the week. Now I have a Minecraft server and a Ubuntu server that runs a couple Docker containers.

Tinkering with computer hardware and learning about different components and how they work together.

Popping open the hood and learning about the different components and how they work together. Unhooking connection to built-in screen to conserve on battery.

This allowed the computer to stay on while the screen was turned off. Saving energy consumption.

The start of my homelab journey...

I decided to start a homelab after I was gifted a lenovo mini pc. At first, I just wanted to run a Minecraft server for my college friends, but this quickly introduced me to the world of self-hosting.

In the image, I had a wired keyboard and mouse, the lenovo mini pc I received, a small layer 2 network switch, a raspberry pi 5, and a 500GB hard drive I salvaged from another laptop. I taught myself how to upgrade the lenovo mini pc from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and bypassed the CPU requirements by using the command prompt. I also taught myself how to make the hard drive into a shared network drive using SMB. I also had an instance of Rasberry Pi OS running on the raspberry pi 5 and didn't know what else I could do with it at that point.

This was a fun project to get started with, and I quickly got hooked on the idea of self-hosting and running my own services. I started looking into different applications and services I could run on my homelab, and I quickly realized that there was a lot of potential for learning and experimentation. I also started looking into different hardware options for my homelab, and I quickly realized that there were a lot of different options available at different price points.

Overall, this was a great project to get started with, and I'm excited to see where it goes in the future. I have a lot of ideas for different services and applications I want to run on my homelab, and I'm excited to learn more about self-hosting and running my own services.

I also run entertainment services like a Minecraft server for my friends and a Jellyfin server for my owned media.