Homelab

tags: documentation

What started as curiosity about how networks and servers actually work turned into a full home infrastructure project. My homelab is where I learn by doing - setting up firewalls, breaking storage configurations, debugging DNS at 2 AM, and documenting everything along the way. It’s an ongoing project that keeps evolving as I find new things to tinker with.

Hardware

The homelab runs on three dedicated machines:

• OPNSense Firewall — Lenovo m720q mini PC (Intel i5 8500T, 16GB RAM, 120GB NVMe, dual-port Gigabit NIC). Handles all routing, DNS, and firewall duties. Documentation
• Proxmox Hypervisor — Runs LXC containers and VMs for all services. LXC & VM Primer
• TrueNAS Storage Server — Sagittarius 8-bay NAS chassis (AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 32GB RAM, LSI 9208-8I HBA, 4x 12TB HGST Ultrastar in RAIDZ1). Dedicated build after outgrowing a virtualized setup. Documentation

Networking

OPNSense sits between the modem and everything else — all traffic flows through it.

• Unbound DNS with Steven Black blocklist for ad blocking
• Tailscale VPN for remote access with advertised routes to the entire 10.10.0.0/16 subnet
• Monit monitoring with ProtonMail SMTP alerts for gateway health
• VLAN segmentation planned (MGMT, DATA, MEDIA, IOT, AI, SERVER, CLIENT, DMZ)
• Naming convention: HL1<FUNCTION><NUMBER> (e.g., HL1PROXMOX1, HL1TRUENAS1)

Storage & Backup

TrueNAS manages four ZFS datasets organized by priority:

• critical — personal files, memories, digital documents
• important — app configs, project files, VM backups
• standard — ISOs, media library, other app configs
• share — shared storage for friends and family

Data protection runs on a schedule: daily Backblaze cloud sync for critical and important data, weekly ZFS snapshots with 1-week retention, weekly S.M.A.R.T. short tests, and bimonthly long tests. Backblaze Documentation

Services

All services run in Docker containers managed through Portainer, with Caddy handling reverse proxy and TLS.

Media

• Plex — media server and streaming
• Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr — automated movie and TV show management
• Overseerr — media request management
• qBittorrent — download client

Documents & Photos

• Paperless-ngx — document scanning, storage, and search
• Immich — photo backup (under maintenance)

Surveillance

• Frigate — NVR with object detection (person, dog, cat) paired with a Dahua 5MP PoE dome camera

Development

• Code-Server — VS Code in the browser for remote development

Other

• Draw.io — diagrams and flowcharts
• Filebrowser — web-based file management
• MetubeUI — YouTube downloader

Notification system runs across OPNSense and TrueNAS via ProtonMail SMTP relay with per-app tokens.

Lessons Learned

Building the homelab came with its share of expensive mistakes. I bought 8 Samsung 870 EVO SSDs that turned out to be counterfeit — 5 of them failed, costing me PHP 18,910 and a lot of frustration. I switched to verified Crucial MX500 drives after that. Full story

Running TrueNAS virtualized inside Proxmox taught me about IOMMU group headaches the hard way — drive disconnections, passthrough failures, and NFS permission nightmares eventually pushed me to build a dedicated TrueNAS server. Setup notes

The biggest takeaway: document everything. Every config change, every workaround, every failure. The homelab blog posts exist because past-me needed them and future-me will too.

Technologies Used

• Proxmox VE
• TrueNAS
• OPNSense
• Docker
• ZFS (RAIDZ1)
• Tailscale
• Backblaze B2
• Caddy
• Plex
• Frigate
• Paperless-ngx
• ProtonMail SMTP