What's in my Homelab - September 2025

2025-09-25

I changed a few things in my homelab since the last post so here we are again with a new post.

Hardware

The mini PC I use (A Fujitsu Esprimo G5010) is still way over-provisioned for my needs. I found a good deal on a 32GB RAM module so I upgraded it and now have plenty of CPU power and RAM to spare for anything I might want to experiment with.

Operating system

I have been running NixOS on a Proxmox LXC for a long time but I realised that I wasn't taking advantage of what Proxmox had to offer me so I switched to bare metal NixOS and I am very pleased with the result.

Don't get me wrong, Proxmox is great and I have always enjoyed using it. I would use it again if I were to manage multiple VMs or LXCs on several machines but for now my needs are simpler than that and I thought removing a moving part is a good idea.

Infrastructure

Having unified everything in a single Nix flake allowed me to further remove more moving parts.

I always tried to keep the configuration of the Proxmox host itself to a bare minimum but I had to tweak a couple of things. I tried to script them using Ansible but I have never really liked that approach. Now my host configuration is fully declarative and I no longer need that.

I also used to rely on Terraform to manage DNS entries for my services and to provision Grafana dashboards. Now that's covered by NixOS-DNS provisioning Grafana dashboards.

My data is still mostly in SQLite (my database of choice for personal services) except for a couple of services requiring Postgres.

For metrics I use InfluxDB2 combined with Telegraf. It works well but I am afraid I might need to move away from InfluxDB2 in the future now that there is InfluxDB3, which is not friendly to self-hosting.

I am still a fan of monitoring all my services with gatus, even more so now that it can alert also on "external endpoints", so I can use it to check that my Restic backups are running as scheduled.

Services

These are the services I run. They are all solid choices, do their work well and they are reasonably light on resources. I would be happy to recommend them to anyone.

• Atuin to have my shell history synchronised across all my machines;
• Blocky, a DNS proxy and ad-blocker;
• Jellyfin as my media server;
• Memos where I write quick notes and memos;
• Miniflux to read RSS;
• Paperless-ngx to keep track of my documents;
• Pocket ID for single-sign-on based on passkeys;
• Syncthing to have some files shared between my devices;
• Vaultwarden as my password manager.

On top of these I also run a bunch of services I have written myself, mostly to collect data and manage my solar inverter but they aren't publicly available.

Conclusion

I reached the stage where everything is in a very stable state, I expect to keep making small tweaks here and there and to keep trying new services, mostly just for fun and to experiment.