Right now it's really just setting up DNScrypt, and maybe swapping some equipment out for lower power consumption.

Moving my servers to Arch (EOS) as my trial for one during 2024 was successful, rock solid. Swapping my router to a Unifi Express as I am switching to an ISP which finally allows me to do so.

Harvester cluster my everything. I really want to play around with having my servers being stationary, a togo cluster (laptops, and UPS in a suit case), and PC all in the same cluster.

Right now they are all segmented rke2 clusters, but Harvester should make running vms way easier too.

Many goals, little time, so we'll see what actually materializes 😅

1. Reimplement my Grafana+Loki stack on public cloud, replace Promtail with a proper Prometheus pipeline (queries are making my qnap go brrr)
2. Start up an Immich instance and migrate Google photos to it
3. Set up Authentik or something equivalent for the aforementioned services and others. I already have a basic Traefik test config without authentication but still don't have it working 100%, so everything stays on TailScale for now

To start - moving services from bare metal to rootless Podman containers running via quadlets. It's something I have had in mind for a while but keep second guessing the distro choice. Long-ish release cadence, systemd-networkd and a recent Podman version in the native repos, well supported, and not Ubuntu.

So far openSUSE Leap seems like the winner. A testing machine is up to install everything, write some deployment scripts, and decide on a storage layout and partitioning scheme.

If anyone has another distro to recommend that checks these boxes let me know!

I like rolling release for the desktop, but only want critical patches in any given month for this server, and a major upgrade no more than every 3-4 years. Or an immutable server distro. But it doesn't seem like networkd is an option for the ones I've looked at (Fedora CoreOS, openSUSE MicroOS), and I am not sure if I want to figure out Ignition/Combustion right now.

Next project - VLANs on Mikrotik.

OP - Navepoint makes good racks for reasonable money. I have a Pro series 9u from them and it went together without any problems. It's on the wall with a pretty big ups in it.

10gb network, a second proxmox host and outside backup

Thank you, I didn’t realize I needed goals

Get everything migrated across to my new k3s cluster. I’ve been using larger boxes (unraid) and a couple of 1L mini PCs with proxmox to run my homelab until now.. but I work with kubernetes and terraform daily and wanted something declarative.

I’ve now got k3s setup with a handful of services migrated (Immich, Tailscale, Nextcloud etc) but there’s still a ton to go (arr suite, various databases, Plex, Tautulli etc). It’s another job entirely.

I love it but sometimes I wonder why I do this to myself 😅

I need to move my mishmash of hard drives, fans, cables, and NUC into a proper NAS box, with a proper power supply and a mini itx motherboard.

Replace Blue Iris with Frigate + Coral

Set up Immich with proper backups

Set up Peertube

Increase my storage pool to fit 100% of my local backups.

Nearline my critical backups

Move my remote backups from BackBlaze to synctoy untrusted crypt on a pie at work.

Transition my main host to Linux, maybe Plex to Jellyfin, setup a switch (have an RS900 and access to acquire a free CS2960), a UPS or two. I may also wind up getting my hands on some PoE cameras and APs. Run some cable too.

1. Finish building a mini-rack with a server (almost done).
2. Finish cabling the house with CAT6 cables.
3. Migrate the current VPS running my docker services to the self-hosted server.
4. Implement a NAS on the server using a virtualized OpenMediaVault instance.
5. Migrate my network infrastructure from a single asuswrt-merlin router to OPNSense + Cisco Switch.

I just reached all my goals at the end of 2024. So stretch goal in my case.

40 gig network for private ceph traffic. Do aggregation on all the nodes for redundancy. Maybe expand to 5 nodes from 3.

I will be moving my entire homelab to a different country, which currently consist of two kubernetes nodes, a NAS and various home automation devices. I will be scaling down gradually, taking cold storage backups of everything and plan to resurrect everything on new hardware once I have moved.

Hopefully I can finally get the IPv6 stack fully working.

OPNsense works, Proxmox works, LXC works, Docker works but Docker Swarm does not.

Either I move away from Docker Swarm or a miracle happens and they finally fix their IPv6 support in 2025.

Thinking about setting up a NixOS or Guix firewall/router. I like OpenWRT but upgrades are a bit annoying, although should improve with the new packaging system.

The idea of having a single config file I can deploy on new hardware almost immediately is very appealing, however.

Last year I wanted to set up a budget media PC and got enamored by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCDmHljsinY

I got a 600 G3 with the 4560 processor, installed Debian onto it and hooked it to my 4k TV mainly to run immich and stremio.

Immich runs just fine, though I have gotten too fast behind its upgrades and having less knowledge about Docker, I'm afraid to update immich. Need to figure that out.

But what disappointed me was that my good quality videos (even the downloaded ones) are choppy to run (unlike the fluid expectations from the video above) and I don't really know what I should look into to make it better.

Buy a NAS , sell my old gaming pc (acting as 1 node in my proxmox cluster of 2), buy a second mini pc, learn more about backups and fallbacks and all that fun stuff

finish setting it up

I have all the hardware laying around collecting dust

From a hardware perspective I need more storage. Am thinking I'll probably end up with a second Synology NAS unit before the end of the year with 4 hard drives at whatever a reasonable price vs size point it at the time I do it (likely 12-14Tb drives at this stage). Bought drives 2 at a time last time so I'm running two RAID1 pairs right now on the existing unit - adding 4 new drives at once to the home lab will let me move all that content to the new drives and reformat the existing ones into a RAID5 array and get an extra 12Tb of storage.

The one I already have does support adding the 5 drive expansion bay, but figuring that with a second NAS I can move some of my Docker instances currently running on a dedicated laptop onto the second NAS which takes one computer out of the setup as well.

Maintenance wise I've just only done my 2024 maintenance stuff that I do each year. This year it was going through my password vault and making sure everything was synced up, had complex passwords, had two factor enabled where applicable, etc, as well as setting up unique email addresses for every service I'm using (they just forward to the same inbox) to help me track who's been selling my info. Have already found a local fast food outlet who has from that.

Have also rotated all my SSH keys, made sure they were all upgraded to Ed25519 from RSA, set up unique keys for the three devices I regularly use so I can revoke one individually if required, made sure all my hardware was running the latest updates (my RPi running my Pi-hole instance was still on Buster so I had to get that updated before I could even update Pi-hole), etc.

Also swapped my Mullvad connection on my gateway to use Wireguard instead of OpenVPN since they're dropping support later this year.

Honestly I'd love to invest in some sort of rack mounting for home, its something I should look into some more, but right now I just have a whole section of the wardrobes in my study for equipment and tech storage. It's working for now although I worry about it in summer with not a massive amount of heat dissipation in there. This weekend is supposed to be close to 40 degrees Celsius both days 🥵

Finalise my physical network to have at least one available port in every essential room & build a new home server/NAS.