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Comment by srjilarious | Hacker News Reader

I just learned about the whole homelab thing a week ago; it's a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected. I'm planning to setup ProxMox today for the first time in fact and retire my Ubuntu Server setup running on a NUC that's been serving me well for last couple years.

I hadn't heard about mealie yet, but sounds like a great one to install.

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Ubuntu Server setup running on a NUC that's been serving me well

In my book, that’s a homelab, it's just a small one (an efficient one?...)

I've set up half a dozen different home labs over the years but never used anywhere near the compute or disk capacity I had. It was more about learning things, I guess. I laughed when he mentioned the number of cores he has available.

I used to have a large server serving a couple important things.

I was able to put everything on a fanless zotac box with a 2.5" sata SSD, and it has served well for many years. (and QUITE a bit less electricity, even online 24/7)

Proxmox is awesome! I've been running it for ~5 years and it's been absolutely stable and pleasant to run services on.

The Proxmox Backup Server is the killer feature for me. Incremental and encrypted backups with seamless restoration for LXC and VMs has been amazing.

I've been looking to get offsite backups going. Where do you keep your backups? NAS + cloud?

I also wanted to back up my big honking zpool of media, but it doesn't economical to store 10+ TB offsite when the data isn't really that critical.

My PBS server has 2 datasources - one local external drive & Backblaze B2. I snapshot to the local drive frequently throughout the day & B2 once in the evening.

Yeah I don't backup any of my media zpool. It can all be replaced quite easily, not worth paying for the backup storage.

In my scenario, PBS runs on a VM on my Synology. My Synology does automated backups to Backblaze B2 daily. It averages about $5/TB for B2 storage costs for me.I only backup the critical stuff I don't want to lose.

If you want to go another, related rabbit hole, check out the DataHoarder subreddit. But don't blame me, if you’re buying terabytes of storage over the next few months :)

Data Hoarding is a bit more involved than just a homelab. Don't want your data hoard to go down or missing, whole you're labbing new techs and protocols.

don't blame me if you’re buying terabytes of USB drives and pulling out the hard drives

I can vouch for Mealie. My wife and I run it locally for family recipes and to pull down recipes from websites. I have a DNS ad blocker running, but most recipe sites are still a mess to navigate on mobile.

You can also distill recipes down. I find a lot of good recipes online that have a lot of hand-holding within the steps which I can just eliminate.

You should definitely try mealie yes. On top of a good way to host your own recipes, the entire thing just feels...really well put together?

I'm not even using the features beyond the recipes yet, but i'm already very happy that i can migrate my recipes from google docs to over there

As others have said, Mealie is an excellent app for any homelab. My wife and I use the meal planning feature and connect it to our Home Assistant calendar that is displayed on a wall-mounted tablet. The ingredient parsing update is amazing and being able to scale recipes up/down is such a time saver.

I've had a ton of fun with CasaOS in the past few months. I don't mind managing docker-compose text files, but CasaOS comes with a simple UI and an "App Store" that makes the process really simple and doesn't overly-complicate things when you want to customize something about a container.

I have Proxmox running on top of a clean Debian install on my NUC, I wanted to allow Plex to use the hardware decoding and it got a bit funny trying to do that with Plex running in a VM, so it runs on the host and I use VMs for other stuff

It's very easy to do this with LXC containers in Proxmox now, as passing devices to a container is now possible from the UI.

With containers, making backups seemed to become impractical with large libraries, since it seems to copy files individually?

I had to switch to VM because of that, passing through the GPU.

Just as easy with VMs, just have to pass the device to the VM

The only downside is that you essentially lock the GPU to 1 VM which there is nothing wrong with doing. At least with LXC, you can share device across multiple containers.

I have an Intel (12th Gen i5-12450H) mini-pc and at first had issues getting the GPU firmware loaded and working in Debian 12. However upgrading to Debian 13 (trixie) and doing apt update and upgrade resolved the issue and was able to pass the onboard Intel GPU through Docker to a Jellyfin container just fine. I believe the issue is related to older linux kernels and GPU firmware compatibility. Perhaps that’s your issue.

Jellyfin, Jellyserr on a QNAP TS-464 runs perfectly well for serving even 4k x265.

A Few Moments Later

There is time dialation in the homelab vortex ... what feels like a few hours can turn out to be years in the real world.

My best McConaughey voice: “this little server is gonna cost us 51 years”

That’s precisely what I meant! I’m at my sixth year, I guess. Maybe longer, I’ve lost my count.

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