I've been trying to write this for days. You know summer is pretty busy for me and I thrive on it. I took some of that energy and started making changes in my homelab. Now I wasn't sure I was going to understand what these changes were for because sometimes I just read about things people recommend for whatever reason and I'm like "yea ok, that's logical". To my surprise a lot things made sense especially as I was making network updates. S/o to my job and the smart people I was around that let me ask questions. Every error I could connect to a previous things that I never understood. With a little help from Claude I've got things stable. Anyway let me start explaining things and if I remember before publishing I should have a new diagram below. ## What I Had I'm probably going to use these words wrong, but let try it anyway. I had 3 main nodes in my homelab. I'll focus on 2, the mini pcs. 1 pc is running proxmox and the other runs casaOS with a few docker containers. There is nothing really bad about this setup, but it isn't what I wanted. I can admit I actually don't like docker compose and stay away from it if possible. ## The Goal Move everything out of casaOS and lean on my hypervisor. Not a hard a goal, but I was actively using things so there is data I have to make sure not to lose. Luckily I can set up new VMs/LXCs with an independent IP, move over the data, and then shutdown the service. ## What Was Done I will start this by saying casaOS is still running because I haven't figured out where to move gitea yet, BUT outside of that everything is smooth. ### Networking The internet always says you need pihole running. I've avoided it long enough, and I also got tired of using ips and not a generic url. I ended up deploying two things, pihole and nginx proxy manager (npm). Pihole is for DNS and npm is a proxy to allow me to use `.lab` to point to one of the many containers. The setup for pihole and npm was pretty good. Their documentation was solid and I put them both in a lxc. Connecting things to the router took a little longer. I don't usually stuble into networking much, but I had to setup my router to point to pihole. Also had to make sure I wasn't causing ips to collide which means there was a lot of documentation. I'll end this by saying the biggest hurdle to get past is to restart your router once you update the dns. That cost me like 20mins since I couldn't get to me `.lab` urls. ### Moving Services Not much I can say here. Depending on the app this comes down to reading their docs. Some apps have an export and restore option that's pretty neat. I will also say if you also have a nas it's a good idea to backup things before doing the move. Remember, scripts are your friends. If you have to do an action more than once it might also be a good idea to create and ansible playbook for things. Anyway here is a list of the services I use... - Gitea - Authentik - UptimeKuma - WalletOS - Nextcloud - Pihole - Nginx Proxy Manager - Wizuh - a random k8s cluster with 2 nodes running talos linux - Wireguard - Matter server - Trmnl server - 2 of my own docker containers I'm dog-fooding ## Any New Hardware? Nope. I was able to find my old rpis, but I don't have the power cables for them. Once I make a mini rack I plan to do POE so that should be a better long term move. The prices for hardware is still crazy high. I would love to add another proxmox node and a new hypervisor in my setup, but eh ya know. I also have a ton of old laptops so maybe I can use them for something. ## What's Next? Keep moving services and making sure they work. As the homelab grows my backup plan gets more and more serious. I use backblaze right now to backup my NAS, but honestly I will probably setup another node at a friends house (I've already talked to them about this). Ideally I want a mini datacenter in my house. If I can find the space and time I'd love a DGX Spark for AI workloads as that continues growing. I still use the cloud, but I don't lean on it heavily for personal projects. More of my 9-5 work is going more hybrid and I want to be more helpful when we are doing in-house work.