Original Homelab

This system has been retired in one way or another for years, but with the last bit of the original homelab infrastructure retired recently I felt it was a good time to write up how it was started. This will be very short and likely not super impressive; if you want that feel free to take a look at the current implementation.

I ended up deploying my first homelab as a result of a need for storing large amounts of video files. I was streaming at the time (around 2020)...and I did alright at it, solid numbers and fairly well liked. Ultimately opted not to stick with it for reasons I won't get into here. Not really the case anymore as there are videos recorded of me with a few thousand views explaining engineering concepts at a nonprofit (I do a yearly coding bootcamp for an LGBTQ nonprofit). But the end result is I had a lot of video files and my dropbox was failing to properly back them up due to the size. Effectively I needed local storage.

The first machine

A dead simple little 7700k running TrueNAS Core. I had recently retired the hardware for a 10900k as well as upgraded the GPU. Was doing overclocking at the time (found digging into ways to push the silicon too fun) so had also purchased a new PSU because the old one had slightly unstable power delivery. So effectively I had all the parts minus a case and drives...so for the same price as buying a prebuilt NAS I could deploy my own...yeah makes sense.

This also how I got exposed to bhyve. At first this was my only machine capable of running VMs and I pushed it harder than that quad core ever should have been so began to hit strange edge cases which required me to start digging into it. And I would do so until I finally migrated the system to TrueNAS Scale in...2024.

The second machine

Sure...a laptop is a perfectly fine server. Said no sane person ever. So effectively this was an old laptop (very bulky from 2014...I used it college) which had just been replaced with an ultrabook and it had a 1TB SSD I had installed in it so I thought sure let's install proxmox. I would end up using that machine for backups, 3D printing (USB pass through to the VM), and home assistant. It would get retired in 2025 (in use for over 10 years at that point) and all VMs would be migrated to another server.

A note...

It wasn't much, but we all start somewhere. Really the key services running were: home assistant, plex, SMB shares, and some custom programs I had written. Definitely grew into something more complex.