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title: My Homelab Architecture desc: Services that I run, hardware and software stacks, and the journey of building and maintaining it. date: 2026-06-12 draft: true ^---
If you read the first post, you would know that I have a bad habit of not documenting things I build. Well now I'm gonna try to fix that by writing about my homelab inner-workings along with the journey and failures of building and maintaining it.
Hardware
I've been looking into PC building for a while and for this homelab, I ordered the parts separately for a 1L OEM mini PC build.
Here's the parts that I bought from the beginning (all from Tokopedia):
- Base: HP Prodesk 400 G4 Mini
- CPU: Intel Core i7-8700T
- RAM: 32GB DDR4 2666MHz (2x16GB) (missmatched, see why below)
- Storage: 512GB NVMe Boot SSD + 1TB SATA Data HDD + 1TB SATA Backup HDD
Software
Currently I'm running NixOS on the host machine using the same flake as my laptop.
Lessons Learned
What's a good project without failures and lessons learned?
Cheaping out on the RAM
Initially I used Proxmox VE and had 16GB of RAM when I first built the lab. That demolished quickly when I started spinning up test VMs and services I didn't plan on using and just left running. I had to upgrade but all the 32GB kits I found were out of my budget (for context, this was before the RAM prices skyrocketed from AI datacenters) so I cheaped out by ordering a really sketchy listing for a used kit. It was last in stock too so I rushed to buy it before someone else can.
After waiting for it to arrive, surprise surprise, one of the sticks didn't work. Luckily the seller was nice enough to give a refund but rather stupidly, I only returned one of the stick and kept the other one. Now of course I tried to buy a new kit but at this point, the RAM crisis hit and I had to find a listing for a single stick of 16GB. Now I'm stuck with mismatched RAM with the other one potentially failing at any moment. So far it's been working and I never had downtime due to RAM failures but it still haunts me that it could fail at any moment. Don't cheap out on RAM.
512GB is not enough
When I first built, I didn't really thought about storage and thought 512GB would be more than enough for the OS and all the services. Of course I started to store my media files, photos, and documents on the server and it quickly filled up. Especially using Proxmox. Now the only things I