Homelabbing and HomeAssistant

In mid-2022 when I moved out and into an apartment, I bought myself a little mini PC and hooked it up to my network. Initially I installed Docker and not much else on it. As time passed, I added a two-bay NAS and began to host a couple of things (Jellyfin for my ripped DVDs, backup software) and I began learning about HomeAssistant (HA). At the time, living in an apartment didn’t allow me to set up a full-blown setup. Instead, I opted for a Google Nest Hub and a couple of Wi-Fi bulbs. I was hooked on the automation more than the voice control, though the voice control was nice for me living on my own.

Fast-forward to late 2024 when the opportunity to move in with my platonic life partner arose, so I jumped on that and instead of an apartment, I now live in a house which provides a lot more opportunity for trying out HA as well as expanding my homelab. Well, long story short, I now have two mini PCs running as servers and I just put together a mini-rack for my gear. I’ll be migrating to the rack in about a week; I was going to migrate this weekend but being on call is not a great time to take the network down. Part of that migration involves moving to a new router and restructuring the network, hence why I can’t take the network down while being on call. It’s just a recipe for disaster.

Currently, I have two servers, Keymaster and Gatekeeper. Keymaster is the main, and newer of the two servers. It runs Proxmox and hosts VMs for HA and a Docker host system. There’s also an LXC instance I have set up which will serve as a reverse proxy and DNS for the home network once I migrate to the new router and change the IP range. Gatekeeper is the OG server and currently it’s duty is running Proxmox Backup Server to back the VMs up. I’ll have a more in-depth write-up about the network and servers at a later time. Once the network migration is done, I’ll write about what I’m hosting.

It turns out this homelabbing thing is a fun hobby for me. I’m trying not to dump a ton of money into it and thus far I’m very happy with how everything is.