Homelab

This page is likey outdated since I’m always tinkering with my homelab. I’ll outline the design and guides / tips for anyone interested in following along.

Design

I’m running Proxmox on a used ThinkCentre. The great thing about 1L pcs is that you can get a solid one for less than $40 on ebay. Their power draw is minimal as well, so you can run it 24/7 without running the electricity bill in your college dorm too high.

Using cheaper hardware also introduces a fun challenge of minimizing the resource usage of your services. I ran into this obstacle often when looking for proxmox helper scripts. I resorted to setting up a few services manually to run them in containers instead of virtual machines.

Above is a rough diagram of the architecture. Starting from the top, we’ve got the Proxmox Datacenter with our Proxmox Virtual Envrionement (pve). This of this as the “head” node that orchestrates all other containers/virtual machines on our Proxmox. We also have an external Synology Network Attached Storage (NAS) as part of our datacenter. We can use this external storage for proxmox - like storing container templates, container data itself - or for external media.

One level lower, I have OpenWRT running in an LXC. OpenWRT is an operating system that allows the LXC to act as a virtual router. I chose OpenWRT for the lower overhead compared to more robust solutions like PFSense. The purpose of this container is to manage traffic of any other containers connected to it. We can then forward all of the traffic of this container + subcontainers through a VPN, anonymizing any traffic we want. The Service(s) node below can by any service we don’t want routing through our regular home router.

Next up I’m running a JellyFin server. Jellyfin allows me to setup a media server, hosting any movies, TV shows, etc. that I own to any device on my network. This is great for playing movies from my laptop, Smart TV, or even phone without needing to move them over with physical storage like a USB.

Finally we’ve got the game server container. This can be anything, but right now I’m hosting a Deathgarden: Rebirth server This lets anyone with the server address to connect and play the game, which was officially discontinued in 2020.

Guides

TBA lmao