Homelab Journey – Part 2

I’ve gotten (at least temporarily) to the end of the line with my Homelab setup journey.

Rack Assembled:

Since my last post, I’ve changed things up. First, the rack is fully assembled and moved into my crawlspace, which will be its forever home. I still need to run the fiber cable outside that will serve my backyard office that I’ll be building at some point. But I’ll leave that until I’ve actually built the office.

Software configured:

Next, for my sanity, I switch from directly running TrueNAS through Proxmox, to instead running HexOS through Proxmox.

I heard about HexOS from a Linus Tech Tips video. It’s essentially a management layer that sites on top of TrueNAS. So you’re still running TrueNAS and get all the great advantages that come with that. However, HexOS takes care of setting up all your ACL’s though, which in my opinion is HUGE. Trying to sort out all the ACL’s the way that I wanted was a nightmare when I was just running TrueNAS.

There are definitely disadvantages to using HexOS though.

First, it’s beta software, so while I haven’t had any issues in 4 months, I would consider it “use at your own risk” right now.

Second, there is still a lot of polish that needs to be done. There are a lot of basic features that haven’t been added in yet. For example, when setting up your storage pool via TrueNAS, you can pick the type of RAID you want to use. HexOS does not allow you to choose this.

Even with that factored in, I’m so glad I switched over.

Network Nerding:

The last piece of this project, which I only did this month, was some network changes.

I had previously been accessing all the different devices and VM’s on my network by IP. That was a pain, so I spun up a little VM to run a dashboard manager called Heimdall. At this point, it was now easy to access everything on my network.

One problem that remained though, is that I have a few devices on my network that are only accessible via HTTPS. These devices didn’t have SSL certificates though, so going to those pages would prompt a browser SSL warning.

In steps NGINX Proxy Manager.

I bought a domain (https://wizarding.cloud) and set it up internally with an SSL from Lets Encrypt. I was then able to set up all the devices/VM’s in my homelab with subdomains.

This was a totally unnecessary step, but it was a fun learning experiment.

Now I feel good with the state of my Homelab. I still want to set up some more things, like a private VPN for my parents to use with streaming services from outside my house. But the state I’m at now represents 90% completion, which is about as much as I finish anything 😂