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What are your Homelab goals for 2025? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

214 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Personally will be trying to transform my server which is currently in a fractal R5 case, into a small-ish Homelab rack, combined with all my network equipment. Will require complete relocation of all network equipment in the house as well as cables so it will be a bit of a project. Also on the lookout for a good quality rack so let me know if you have any recs. Still unsure if u want to do full width rack or mini. Part of me really want the UDM Pro from Unifi..

What are your goals and thing you want to accomplish during 2025?

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I want to move my whole server to NixOS. It's gotten to the point where I have no idea where all the Ubuntu config files went, and handling half of it via Docker vs baremetal. I hope this will allow me to set up proper backups as well, and maybe get better at Nix! I started a few days ago using the VM feature, but it's tricky to work on for now, perhaps I haven't found the right workflow.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

I went this route from the start and love it. In case you need some resources:

VimJoyer is excellent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a67Sv4Mbxmc
Do secrets using SOPS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5f6GC7SnhU
NixOS and Restic are an amazing combination, full backups in 20 lines of config. This article was my best find for this: https://francis.begyn.be/blog/nixos-restic-backups . Tip: you can easily write systemd services to trigger each software's preferred backup strategy and simply schedule them to run before the Restic backup - I have them all copy the backups to one folder that then Restic backs up, works great for me!

Hope this helps a bit. I found the effort to be very worth it, but took me almost half a year to get comfortable with it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

Another vote for restic, best backup software I've ever used.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Thank you! It definitely does, I will be using that Restic article for sure! I actually use NixOS on my main laptop, which I found via Vimjoyer's videos. It's great, though I wish documentation for more advanced usage was more readily available. I started making the server, currently my biggest roadblock is testing the infrastructure without going live (I made the flake generate a VM for now but it takes a long time to build it every edit and I can't even get ssh working) and figuring out how I'll eventually install it with minimal downtime.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

On the topic of build times, it took me too long to learn that nixos-rebuild supports remote build workers and targets.

For example, if I am editing on my laptop, want to build on my desktop, and apply the build to my file server, then I'd run...

me@laptop$ nixos-rebuild test \
--flake ~/wherever-it-lives \
--build-host desktop \
--target-host file-server \
--use-remote-sudo

The host names should match the name of the nixosConfiguration output from your flake. If they don't I think you can specify like, --target-host .#some-machine

Remote sudo avoids having to SSH as root.

Bonus tip: Having Tailscale on every machine makes this work reliably from anywhere, network speed as the limit.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Is there a reason(s) you’re doing NixOS over something like ProxMox? A friend of mine has been moving his lab over to ProxMox containers so i was thinking to do the same thing, but curious about NixOS since I’ve seen a few people mention it. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The entirety of Nix configuration is in somewhere between 1 and 3 files depending on how you like your poison.

It's immutable, so stuff can't just change on you.

Every change you make is stored into a new configuration and you can roll back to any configuration you've ever done with a reboot, so it's kind of hard to brick it.

Apps can't just go in and modify your users or your host table or any of the other configs so it's got an extra layer of security. But then, the package system has more packages than God and is maintained by a million randos with very little oversight.

It has some substantially neat tricks. I moved from one box to another by just doing a fresh install, moving its three configuration files and letting syncthing rebuild my home directory from my other box.

I think, if I were going to use Nix as a home server, I just install all of the services directly on the OS. Updates and configurations for everything would be maintained by Nix itself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

No reason you can't use NixOS in a VM on Proxmox.

My container host OS is another immutable, uCore, which I run in a VM on Proxmox.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Never said you couldn't I was assuming OP was running VMs inside of Nix

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Nix is great if your fine with the packages and configuration they provide. If you want other stuff or features not provided it is a giant pain in the ass and not worth it. And you'll get oh just write a flake or just write a package file for it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

Tried it didn't like it. To much work to get somethings working. Went back to docker.