Okay, since my last posts and the help you provided me I have been learning and designing my first home lab that I want to be minimalist, capable and efficient. I think this is the closest thing that will fulfill my needs (and the needs of a lot of beginner’s small home labs that I have read about around here).
I still need your expertise on some points to complete everything, so please keep reading :)
My hope is to produce a second version of this diagram later that could help beginners to visualise what their first step in the homelabing world could resemble.
A lot of inspiration is taken from this blog article to get the most out of a mini pc. I know some questions of mine might have been, at least partially, already answered, so please feel free to point me to the interesting stuff I missed.
Questions (general):
- Do you guys see a major hiccup with my design?
- I selected TrueNAS Scale because I will be using containers first alongside one or two specific VMs. Any other open source OS I missed that I should consider over TrueNAS Scale? Would Cockpit be useful here?
Questions (blue circles):
- From r/homelab wiki, the U6 Lite is recommended for wifi access point. Is this still up to date? What should I also look to with a ~$100 budget?
- What should I consider if I virtualise the router? What option do I have to preserve internet access in case of failure? (no HA needs here, just want to avoid fixing things up over my phone network in the middle of the night). What would be a nice way to use VLANs in my case (if even needed)?
- Is there any specific thing to configure so containers can access NAS storage for their data?
- What would be a good ZFS strategy regarding internal drives? As described in the diagram, I can put in a total of 2x2TB NVMe SSDs + 1x4TB SATA SSD (matching Beelink’s description, not sure if more is feasible but it is enough for me right now). I’d like a configuration that allow me to lose and replace one drive without breaking anything, hotswap not needed.
- How would you backup that config in case of hardware failure or 2 drives lost? Full duplicate on external drives? Only OS /containers config + NAS data?
- Subsequent question, what external drive would you use regarding the chosen backup strategy? A remote backup is planned as well.
- Each PC will have its own backup drive. In addition, how can I use that little server to backup home PCs too? (not sure if I’m aiming for real time or periodical backups here, probably the second).
Thank you very much for your time, I really value your feedback on my design here, so please do not hesitate to ask for more information if I have missed anything, or give constructive feedback (even on my diagram, I know this is not the conventional way diagrams are represented here, but I tried to mix both hardware and software logic so it is clearer for beginners).
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- Yes
- Don’t virtualise your router as it creates more attack surface and risk for miss configuration as well as providing less stability. Can recommended OpenWRT & OPNsense 3.Depends if they are on the same device or not. 4.Can’t help with this one, sorry. 5.Look up the 321 storage rule 6.Any thing of site and example a cloud storage provider and encrypt your backups to them so your data is safe. 7.Depends on what you want to backup I would recommend photos, videos, documents & config files.
Good luck :)