What’s up, what’s down and what are you not sure about?
Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.
I finally finished my first iteration of my Minilab including a very smooth migration from the old server yesterday so I can go to the service side of things again. I plan to get some kind of selfhosters VPN for external access to stuff that’s not exposed to the internet, I’ll have to investigate which one.
I’m still trying to get a good backup strategy. I am currently using Duplicati but I cannot get the before script execution to work. I will eventually look at Kopia.
What kind of hardware are you using for a mini lab? I want to switch from a raspberry pi 5 to a small form factor Intel based system so I can run Proxmox. I was looking at the Lenovo m920q or an Optiplex 79xx series machine.
Do you have any recommendations for backups or the hardware switch I mentioned?
Have a look at Backrest for Restic. It works great with pre/post scripting and supports healthchecks for monitoring status and stats.
Also is a nice easy to use WebUI which is great for servers.
I’ll look at this again. I had it before and did not stick with it though I don’t remeber why now.
I use cron schedules to run scripts that backup my important stuff to s dedicated backup drive, then copies the backups to a different external drive, then upload the backups to a dedicated backup cloud storage account. Then it deletes any backups older than a month.
If you do make a switch to Proxmox, then Proxmox Backup Server is where it’s at for backups. Its de-duplication feature is incredible. I backup all my Proxmox VMs/LXCs with it, as well as my non-Proxmox hosts (laptop, etc.), with
proxmox-backup-client.Personally, I’m using a few of those tiny Beelink PCs (a couple Mini S12 and an EQ12) with the N100 processor, as well as a couple larger rackmount PCs I built for situations where I needed to add an HBA or some other PCI-Ex device. I do recommend something like a Beelink before building, though - they run Proxmox fine, they’re inexpensive, efficient, quiet, and each one can run a handful of VMs.
Yeah, I heard about Proxmox backup and that sounds really nice. Love the idea of being able to take a snapshot before any major changes to a VM and then if it goes south restore from snapshot very quickly.
I don’t know Duplicati or Kopia, im mostly just using VM snapshots as backups. I store them in an NFS Share on my NAS.
I just posted my Minilab, check my history - I’m also using tiny Lenovos. m920q should be able to do anything you want it!