about: HomeLab

In the end of the last year I started to build an own HomeLab. This post covers some superficial thoughts on this.

Quick facts

Here are some quick facts:

• I bought an used Fujitsu Esprimo Q920. Specs:
  • Costs: 148€
  • Intel i5 (4.Gen) processor
  • 16GB RAM
  • 500GB SSD
  • ⌀11W Power consumption
• I use Fedora as the OS.
• Everything runs inside my local network.
• I use Wireguard to reach it from the outside.
• I use docker compose to run services.
• Whenever possible I try to centralize services (e.g. using only one Postgres database).

Tools that I use

The awesome-selfhosted repository on GitHub gives a good list to grasp when searching for things to set up. With Docker it is really easy to try out software, run it and throw it away or keep it if needed.

Currently I have the following services installed:

• Uptime Kuma for monitoring
• Espial for bookmarks
• Filebrowser as a fast file storage
• HomeAssistant for home automation
• FreshRSS as an RSS reader
• Gitea for my own Git instance
• Jenkins to automate builds
• paperless-ngx to manage my documents
• Trilium for my notes

Backups

Backups are important and once you’ve set it up correctly, you shouldn’t really care.

I guess I’ll set it up again in the future as for now I just compress my mounted directories and store them on USB drives.

In the best case I’d store the whole OS and not just as a local copy, but rather remotely anywhere.

For this I have the following challenges:

• Find a secure remote storage for a reasonable price.
• Find the time in between all other more fun stuff. ;)

For now I’m okay with storing it on USB drives. I also tried to restore it different times.

Things I’d do differently

When I’d start from the beginning I’d either buy two more machines and create a Kubernetes cluster or set up VMs on the Esprimo to create a cluster. But that’s ‘just for the fun’. Maybe I’ll try MicroK8s or so one day.

Why no Raspberry Pi?

In the HomeLab scene there is a tendency to use a Raspberry Pi, but I didn’t want this. I actively decided against that older versions don’t seem to be powerful enough for my use cases. I don’t like to have the feeling that there is a limitation in the things I want to set up.

The newest Raspberry Pi would be powerful enough, but isn’t as cheap as older versions. So I had to choose between nearly a same priced small PC or a Raspberry Pi and the PC won as it has an SSD (which feels more confident than a SD card) and more computing power

Energy consumption

The con is definitely the higher electricity consumption. Even with a manageable 11W of the Esprimo, it is consuming far more than a Raspberry Pi.

To save energy I turn it off in the evening and sometimes during the day when I’m away. Thanks to Wireguard I can use Wake-on-LAN to wake it up again and SSH to log into it whenever needed.

I have no thoughts how it’ll change when I’ll upgrade Home Assistant.

Here it is

Here’s a picture of it in action: