Redoing homelab and need your insights

I recently upgraded my TrueNAS server to a Synology. While TN has served me well, I don’t have the time anymore to administer it.

I’m now using the opportunity to redo my whole home lab - after years that has become quite a mess.

I’ll retire my old TN appliance as it requires too much energy and is quite bulky. I’m remaining with 1 NUC and a second knock off NUC with slightly lower specs but 2+ LAN ports

What would you do with that Setup? I’ll probably run Proxmox on the NUC and have the second one as a backup, however this one can connect directly to the NAS with a dedicated connection through multiple LAN ports.

I’ll mostly run containers and a few VMs (Git, Pihole, Backup Services, …). My Synology supports both but I’d like to keep things separate. My infrastructure is taken care off, I won’t host pfSense or similar.

I haven’t looked into best practices recently and would like to learn new technologies as Ansible etc.

How do you automate your installations and updates? How does that go together with containers and VMs? Proxmox or maybe plain Debian/Fedora/…?

Thanks for sharing!

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

If you don’t have much time, I would keep it as simple as possible. Just put Fedora on it, administer it through Cockpit if you like a web-gui and run the software via Podman self-updating containers. Storage on btrfs raid1.

operator,
operator avatar

Thanks! I have heard of Cockpit and Podman but never used it. I do use Fedora Workstation on my main laptop and find it quite reliable. Can you share a few pros or cons?

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Cockpit is not the most advanced in regards to monitoring but it keeps it simple and manageable.

Podman runs all Docker containers (at least in rootful mode), but you are better off turning the usual docker-compose scripts into systemd service files via the built in Quadlet system. A bit more work initially, but then all the containers are nicely managed like any other service via systemd.

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