Proxmox home lab

The whole lab is one second-hand HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF — an i5-6500 with 32GB of DDR4 — plus five drives that didn’t fit in the case, so they live on an acrylic rack next to it with their own PSU.

Proxmox runs on bare metal with ZFS underneath, which means snapshots and real checksumming rather than hoping the disks are honest. Four 4TB disks carry anything I’d be upset to lose; an 8TB disk runs on its own as Media0, deliberately without redundancy, because re-downloading a film is cheaper than paying for a second 8TB drive. Above that, everything is containerised and managed through Portainer.

Pi-hole and AdGuard Home both handle DNS for the house, Nextcloud gives me file sync I actually own, and NFS exports the pool to the rest of the LAN. Vaultwarden is next.

It has broken in most of the ways a home lab can break, which is the point. I’m currently mid-way through a 2.5GbE upgrade using a Realtek RTL8125 over USB-C, testing the stock r8169 driver before deciding whether it needs replacing.