38 lines
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2.4 KiB
Markdown
38 lines
No EOL
2.4 KiB
Markdown
title: My Homelab Architecture
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desc: Services that I run, hardware and software stacks, and the journey of building and maintaining it.
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date: 2026-06-12
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draft: true
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^---
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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.
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## Hardware
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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.
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Here's the parts that I bought from the beginning (all from Tokopedia):
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- Base: HP Prodesk 400 G4 Mini
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- CPU: Intel Core i7-8700T
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- RAM: 32GB DDR4 2666MHz (2x16GB) (missmatched, [see why below](#cheaping-out-on-the-ram))
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- Storage: 512GB NVMe Boot SSD + 1TB SATA Data HDD + 1TB SATA Backup HDD
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## Software
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Currently I'm running NixOS on the host machine using the same flake as my laptop.
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## Lessons Learned
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What's a good project without failures and lessons learned?
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### Cheaping out on the RAM
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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.
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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.**
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### 512GB is not enough
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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
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### Proxmox VE is overkill |