Update July 2025
Well, I had intended to write more about homelabs and what I have been doing, but I ended up sinking a lot off time into my 3rd book in my Eta Cancri series: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQ5YH7K3
But now that’s done, I need to take a breather and focus on something else before I plunge into book 4.
As to my homelab, I’ve settled on running the following:
- 2 Lenovo ThinkCentre 1U used machines – M720Q Tiny Desktop, Intel i7 8700T – M720Q Tiny Desktop, Intel i5 9500T
- A Beelink Mini S12 Mini PC
- ZimaBlade 7700 E3950
I’m using Proxmox to host FreeBSD and Debian servers.
FreeBSD for my web server, Debian for Docker.
Beelink is running Docker.
The ZimaBlade I used to build a basic NAS.
On Docker I’m running a number of services, including but not limited to:
- Vaultwarden (https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden)
- Jellyfin (https://jellyfin.org/)
- Gitea (https://about.gitea.com/)
- CalibreWeb (https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web)
- Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/)
- GroundSeg for Urbit (https://github.com/Native-Planet/GroundSeg)
- AzuraCast (https://www.azuracast.com/)
- TrueNAS – FreeBSD version (https://www.truenas.com/)
So far, I have found Docker to be great for spinning up services. It has its own issues, what doesn’t, but if you aren’t concerned about shared resources, kernel and process isolation, etc., it’s easy to set up and find a yml config for many things.