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State of my homelab in June 2025

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Almost a year has passed since I wrote the last State of my homelab update, and that means it is high time to write a new one. In the recent months my homelab has seen many changes, both in hardware and software, so there is a lot ot to talk about.

Networking

I recently wrote a blog post about my networking setup, so here let’s just have a short summary:

At the time of writing the previous state of my homelab, my whole networking setup was a TP-Link Archer router/AP and an also TP-Link Wi-Fi extender.

Now I am running an almost solely Mikrotik setup, with the most important part being a Wi-Fi mesh system built on two Mikrotik Audience access points. The second Audience also works as a provider of wired ethernet to a PoE switch for a part of my homelab. More details in the linked blog post.

Main Server/NAS

The insides of my NAS

My main server is still my old gaming PC from 2015, which has now almost fully reached the status of being a Computer of Theseus. Currently the only part left of the original build is the motherboard, a Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3. The CPU is an Intel Xeon E3-1275L v3, 4C8T low power server processor, still providing enough power to do anything I want with that server.

RAM is I think the main bottleneck here. 32GB of 1600MT/s memory in four sticks is relatively slow and gets eaten up quickly, especially by ZFS’s cache.

The GPU is an Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB from EVGA. It finds it use in BOINC, for Jellyfin transcoding and a few other tasks. I will at some point write a blog post with a list of usecases for having a GPU in a homelab.

The thermals are okayish, the box lives under my desk for now, and in a room where I also sleep, so all the fans are set in the silent mode. The disks run at 40-45C, with the 2.5” SSD boot drive being the hottest one. The disks get cooler when the GPU is running, which would suggest that I need more exhaust fans. But that will happen once I move my homelab to a separate room in my future house. Then noise will not be an issue.

Storage

Having storage is important in a NAS [citation needed].

The boot drive is a 500GB SSD. It works, stores the OS, not much else to write about it.

Then there are the two ZFS pools. Each one is a mirror of two 4TB HDDs, one is made from a WD Red Pro and a Seagate Ironwolf. The second one is two refurbished HGST drives. Both are regularly scrubbed and so far do not show any problems.

The newest addition in terms of storage is a NVMe 1TB SSD in a PCIe adapter. It is also running a ZFS pool, a single-disk one. I mentioned in the last blog post on LXD that running a monitoring stack on spinning rust is causing a constant noise as the drives record data continuously. And this is my solution, I moved the more active LXD containers to this NVMe pool, and the NAS is again mostly quiet.

The new PSU

Old vs New

The most recent change to my main server has been the new power supply. I replaced a Bronze efficiency Seasonic with a Platinum efficiency BeQuiet! The new model is the Power Zone 2 750W.

At first I was planning a separate blog post talking about the change in power consumption when moving from a Bronze to a Platinum PSU, but I realized I do not have enough usable data and my test would be not scientific enough to allow me to make definite statements. Before I replaced my PSU I have been monitoring the power consumption of this server specifically for only a few days and I simply had not enough data for comparison. Also my GPU sometimes decides to idle at 15W and sometimes at 7W, further making it hard to compare apples to apples.

However, I can give a very general statement that I see an around 10% decrease in power consumption in my specific usecase, but as I said, take it with a brick of salt.

Apart from the better efficiency, the new PSU gives me future proofing by providing more power (550 vs 750W) and this fancy new 12VHPWR connector in case I someday want to add a more powerful GPU. Or if I want to have a core meltdown inside my case.

Software

In terms of software of my main server, I reduced a lot the number of services running there. The OS is still Debian 12. The container orchestrators are Docker and LXD. And the services are:

I already wrote blog posts about some of the services above:

Deploying Nextcloud locally with LXD

Installing Actual Budget expense tracker in LXD and serving it using Tailscale with TLS.

Continued adventures with LXD: Grafana, InfluxDB, and ZFS storage

Using Pinchflat and Jellyfin to download and watch Youtube videos

Writing a blog for almost three years now gives you quite a few posts to refer to :)

I’ve been using Caddy as the reverse proxy for my services, but now I am moving to reverse proxies installed directly in the LXC containers and serving SSL traffic via Tailscale, as I described in this blog post:

Access local Nextcloud with HTTPS anywhere by using Tailscale TLS certificates

Backup Server

The insides of my the backup server, it is a mess, I know.

Buying that new PSU left me with enough spare parts to build a second PC. I still find it amusing that I remember the times when there was The Family PC, a single unit standing proudly in its designated space and shared among the family members, and now everyone has at least one computing device and all of them are internet-connected.

Anyway, that second PC is a mix and match of different parts I had lying around. The motheboard is some Socket 1150 Asus with a i5-4460 Intel CPU, the exact one I bought in 2015 to power that first gaming PC. It still provides enough power for a headless machine, no problem. 8 gigs of some random RAM, a small SSD for the boot drive.

The case is an Akyga AK36BK, one of the cheapest available cases for the mATX format. It’s special feature is being made of steel so thin, you can easily bend it with your fingers if something does not fit. The downside is space for only a single 3.5” HDD unless you resort to some weird actions like velcroing drisks together.

Glue my disks into clusters, this is my last resort

It’s highlight and main reason to exist is the 3TB HGST hard drive. It’s aim is to be the backup drive for my main NAS. I’m not able to fit everything on it, but the most important stuff like documents fits there fine. In the future I plan to buy a refurbished 16TB drive to be able to backup everything from my main NAS with some place to spare.

To copy over ZFS datasets between computers I am using a great tool called syncoid.

Power consumption is not an issue with this PC because the plan is to use it as a cold storage, boot it up every few days or weeks, copy over my NAS pools, do a scrub and turn it off again.

There is also a mystery PCIe board visible in the photo, but that will be the topic of an upcoming post :)

And with this machine I have almost reached the 3-2-1 rule of storage. For my most important data like documents or images, I have three copies of each file, and one of those copies is in the cloud (a Hetzner Storage Box).

Other boxes

One of the reasons I reduced the number of services running on my main NAS is that I divided them among other PCs:

ADS-B

For at least a year now I’ve been planning to a blog post about my ADS-B airplane tracking setup. But today is not this day. So in short: I have a Raspberry Pi 4b 4GB RAM, powered by a PoE HAT, running dump1090-fa software to track airplanes with the help of an RTL-SDR USB dongle and a DIY antenna. More on that in the future.

Home Assistant

The HA box, one of the Audience access points, and the printer which sometimes even works.

My Home Assistant box is a Lenovo Thinkcentre M625q. I wrote about the whole setup in the Using a Lenovo USFF PC as a Home Assistant box blog post.

At some point in the future I will need to reinstall Home Assistant though, as the development team is deprecating the HA Supervised install method, I will be switching to the HA OS.

Streaming Box

And finally (I dearly hate the phrase “last but not least”) there is the Streaming Box that my wife uses. The box lives under her TV, and she uses it to watch Netflix and every other streaming service. The OS on it is Linux Mint, so that makes her a Linux user :) The box is Fujitsu Esprimo Q920 with a i3-4170T low power Intel. It usually works fine, but sometimes does not want to start, then I need to open it, wiggle the parts inside a bit and it starts again.

Bottom Line

And this is my homelab. To be precise, this is the “local” part of the homelab, I have not described my different VPSes that I am using, those will be the topic of another blog post.

This setup will probably last until the end of this year. If everything goes fine, somewhere around New Year’s we will be moving to our new house, and things may change with the homelab during the move. But that also depends on the free budget I will have during that time, so nothing is set in stone.

Thanks for reading! I do enjoy writing those updates and I hope you enjoy reading them.

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