Homelab - Soup to Nuts

[zeeclor]

@Bryan

My rack is mostly a collection of learning experiences at this point — a few failed attempts at trying to do things the “right” way

@Bryan

This is yesterday’s post from Brandon Lee at VirtualizationHowTo. I think it’s good advice and I have followed a few of his recommendations and plan to follow up on some of the others.

I have pi-hole providing DNS for my homelab but he and @Belfry favour technitium.

I have lots of useful things in my local git repository (gitea) but it’s all got a bit messy so I am tempted to start again with Gitlab which I recall @mcrilly saying was a good option.

For automation ArgoCD is also on the list of things to try but how to use it in my lab is still just a vague concept to me.

I am playing with AI but only in the cloud. I note the past discussions here about running local AI models and there limitations. The models are getting better even for local use but I don’t have a decent high end graphics card. So I am stumped (as I was with VLANs without a managed switch). I keep hoping the hardware prices will come down but Ramageddon rages.

Generally however I think Brandon gives excellent advice and he is a prolific poster on homelab technologies so subscribing to his newsletter may give you some ideas on things to try.

[Belfry]

@zeeclor

This is yesterday’s post from Brandon Lee at VirtualizationHowTo. I think it’s good advice and I have followed a few of his recommendations and plan to follow up on some of the others.

Thanks for sharing, @zeeclor. I had a quick look at the post just now and will come back to it and the video in more detail in the coming days when I’ve got more time.

@zeeclor

I have pi-hole providing DNS for my homelab but he and @Belfry favour technitium.

Whatever is doing DNS, I agree with Brandon’s points about making it a first-class service, and also his point earlier in the article about getting the network design right. Might be slightly biased though, given the several talks last year on DNS and VLANs (and IPv6 - get on the IPv6 train!). The design piece is worth thinking through - I want to experiment and learn is probably going to look different to I want to block ads is probably going to look different to I want to stop all those horrid IoT devices at home from going wild is probably going to look different to I want to run big AI/transcoding workloads…

Re: Technitium - I moved to a Technitium cluster around 6 months ago and couldn’t be happier with it. I’ve used Pi-Hole and AdGuard Home before, but I wanted to explore the clustering and redundancy features, and treat it as a first-class service. Setting that up (and getting the network design right) has been part of a broader “hybrid homelab” rollout project throughout 2026. It’d probably make a decent talk towards the back half of the year if there’s any interest from the group.

I think something relevant to us in Australia is the power consumption element as well. That translates directly to cost, either being billed directly, or lost opportunity cost in exports for those with batteries and/or solar. I’m already saving ~$9.50/month net by not hosting stuff at home (after the additional cost of VPSes), and instead moving select services to VPSes and accessing them via Wireguard. I had plenty of other reasons to change my setup at home, but it highlights that power costs aren’t negligible for us and they’re worth considering as part of the soup to nuts process.

[techman]

@Belfry

I think something relevant to us in Australia is the power consumption element as well. That translates directly to cost, either being billed directly, or lost opportunity cost in exports for those with batteries and/or solar. I’m already saving ~$9.50/month net by not hosting stuff at home (after the additional cost of VPSes), and instead moving select services to VPSes and accessing them via Wireguard. I had plenty of other reasons to change my setup at home, but it highlights that power costs aren’t negligible for us and they’re worth considering as part of the soup to nuts process.

So true Belfry and something to account for as Australia is the third most expensive country in the world for electricity !

That’s why my Starlink ‘Dishie’ is now turned off every day 10pm to 6am by a timeswitch as it’s like a continuously lit 35W bulb otherwise.

My PC also goes into sleep mode at the same time, as do I.

But we are also bound to be cut off from that world in the event of war or catastrophe. which is why I have put so much effort into a backup local LLM in case I don’t have access to Deepseek-V4 which is in China.

Nothing competes with the full on AI models, or even comes close, but now the AI genie is out of the bottle there is no going back, and imho, even a dumb-ass local AI genie is still heaps better than no Internet.