Add blog post about homelab adventure

src/content/posts/a-homelab-adventure

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+---
+title: "A homelab adventure"
+publishDate: "18 Nov 2025"
+description: "\"Fine, I'll do it myself.\""
+tags: ["software", "homelab"]
+---
+
+## The bare minimum
+
+When I think back, it all started with a friend asking if I can help them learn proxmox. I didn't know anything about
+proxmox, so I told them sorry, but it somehow stuck with me. Few months later I realized I'm not really using my mini
+gmktec pc for much. I initially bought it for playing league of legends, since I'm daily driving linux and it was about
+time riot decided to require installing a rootkit on your specifically windows machine to play their game. I found
+myself not playing much, so it went. I grabbed a thumb drive, burned proxmox iso on it and gave it a go.
+
+After the first impressions of the web interface, I kew what should be the first service to run on it. Pihole. I've
+been using adguard dns on my router before, but I liked the idea of hosting dns server locally on my own network. It
+even comes with an option to define local dns records, so I can use actual domain names instead of ip addresses to
+access my other services.
+
+Very second thing I installed was homeassistant. I actually tested using it before, hosted on my main PC in a docker
+container, but it lacked plugin support and some things I wanted to do were just not possible without them. Thus, my
+first actual VM was born. The only smart device I had at the time was a lightbulb in my room, that I was using a mobile
+app to control. Luckily the bulb fully supported homeassistant, so I just hooked it right up, and now I can turn it off
+if I forget to do it before going out.
+
+## The files
+So, now that I had a dedicated machine running proxmox I might as well host my music and movies on it, right? So I
+created jellyfin CT. When doing so, I made my first mistake. "I need space for my media, so I'll just create a 1TB mount
+point. What could go wrong?". Well, turns out that a lot can go wrong when you later decide to add more services that
+concern media, like navidrome for music streaming. And now I need to duplicate my music files, because there is no easy
+way to share the same local storage between two containers that is not absolutely cursed. So I pivot straight into
+another mistake: doing the exact same thing, but with samba server. Now I have a local mount point on that smb share and
+at least I can share my media between multiple containers and even manage the files myself from my pc. While it's still
+not great, it's an upgrade. At least I don't have to duplicate my files anymore. With that disaster temporarily out of
+the way it's time to add some actually useful stuff.
+
+## The useful stuff
+I got Homarr as a dashboard for quick access to my other services. While it's working fine for me, I'm considering
+writing my own dashboard in the future to have ultimate control over it. Next were Prowlarr and deluge client, deluge of
+course having mounted my smb share as download location. I also added n8n instance, mainly to mess around with, but
+it ended up being pretty simple way of automating a few things, including discord notifications for articles from this
+very blog! Next up, freshRSS for centralizing my news and youtube subscriptions in one place.
+
+Having all of that is sure nice and all, but what if I want to go somewhere and still be able to watch me some anime
+or listen to my music on the go? Sadly this part kinda sucks. My asus router I got way before I did any thinking about
+homelabbing has vpn built in, so I just set that up and am now using wireguard to connect directly to my home network.
+For now, it works. I plan on building my own router in the future, so I can have more control, because asus stock
+firmware absolutely sucks and requires consent to send data to their servers to enable any functionality that might be
+remotely useful.
+
+## Gaming
+For the longest time I wanted to get my forever minecraft world off the internet and host it in my house, so I can still
+access it if the internet goes down. I simply installed pterodactyl wings CT and added it to my existing pterodactyl
+panel (which after today's cloudflare outage I now plan to also bring onto my homelab). Now my world, testing server and
+a proxy are running on my mini pc. I still want my friends to be albe to join, so I repurposed the old vps where the
+server was running before and set up nginx and haproxy to forward the traffic to the minecraft proxy running at home.
+The old vps happens to have 500mbps connection and my home connection is 1tbps, so even if the nightmare scenario
+happens and the proxy gets ddosed, I will still enough wiggle room to keep my home connection usable.
+
+## The storage situation
+Turns out having just 2 nvme slots with 1tb and 4tb drives respectively is not enough if you want to download all media
+you might ever want to watch. Free space was running low and it was running out fast. I decided to make an actual
+investment into my home setup and bought a 4-bay NAS from terra master. For the drives, I got 3 12tb WD purples and
+set them up in raid5, giving me 24tb of usable space with basic redundancy. I could now move all my media files off the
+mini pc and start using that space for more things. I still use that 4tb nvme as a file server for some of the
+containers that need faster storage, but most of the files now live on the NAS.
+
+As I got a separate device for storage, I've set it up so proxmox now backups all the VMs and CTs directly onto the NAS.
+Pterodactyl wings on my proxmox node are also now configured to save backups on the NAS. I also had borg backup set up
+for my main pc, but I just changed my daily driver distro from ubuntu to cachyos and I haven't found time to set up borg
+on it yet, but hopefully I will manage to get enough time to do it before any major failure happens.
+
+## Smart home
+I mentioned that while setting up homeassistant I only had a smart bulb to play with. Since then, I've been accumulating
+IoT devices. My room now has a smart extension cord that tracks how much power my pc is using, I switched all lightbulbs
+in the house to ones I can control with homeassistant and I made some automations involving the wireless switches that
+communicate over zigbee. I also own a roomba, which I can control with homeassistant, but it's been getting worse and
+worse since I disconnected it from the internet, so when it finally dies I plan on replacing it with a vacuum that I can
+flash with custom firmware and fully control locally. Some miscellaneous things I also have zigbee thermometers per
+room, printer and tv. I don't trust any of the electronic locks, so none of that will be ever happening.
+
+## Where am I now?
+In a pretty good place, I feel. Things are running smoothly, I have backups and redundancy in place. Some basic
+automation and more freedom with what I can do in my house. Of course, there's still things to do. Like finally sorting
+out that leftover local storage that was left on the original samba server CT and migrating all the files from it onto
+properly mounted directory that can be accessed by multiple containers without going though network stack. I learned
+quite a bit from this whole endeavor and I know I will learn more as I improve and expand my homelab. I'll be sure to
+share any major updates to the story here, so check back, or even subscribe to the RSS feed linked to this site!