HomeLab

I got two servers out of interest: one from the City of Dudelange and one from MixVoip. Since then they've been my playground for almost everything I wanted to try out:

• Minecraft server
• Crypto mining
• Nextcloud
• Proxmox
• Local AI (see OwnAI)
• TrueNAS

Right now both servers are offline. Electricity isn't cheap, so I'm rebuilding the setup to run on one server only, and this time with a clear goal.

The plan

Once I finish the BTS I'll lose my school Office 365 account. Instead of moving everything to another cloud, I want my data on my own system and not scattered across my PC.

• TrueNAS as the operating system, with the two disks in a RAID 1 mirror so one drive can fail without losing data. When I buy more disks, I'll move to RAID 5.
• Immich for the photos from my phone and laptop. Uploads happen automatically, like Google Photos.
• Nextcloud for documents and organisation. With EuroOffice, calendar and Talk, it replaces Office 365 and Teams.
• WireGuard VPN, so only I and my home network can reach the data. Nothing is exposed to the internet.
• Pulse to monitor the server.

Hardware

Server

• Intel Xeon
• 16 GB DDR4 RAM
• 2× 1 TB HDD

Raspberry Pi 4

• 4 GB RAM
• 16 GB microSD

What I want to learn

• Running my own services every day, not just setting them up once
• Planning storage and RAID properly before the data is on it
• Securing access with a VPN instead of opening ports