Aaron Godfrey

Aaron Godfrey

Software Engineer and Home Automation Enthusiast.

Homelab Journey

3 minute read

A few months ago I built my first computer in over a decade and installed it into my server rack. My homelab is one of my new hobbies and trying out new self-hosted apps and maintaining it has been surprisngly fun.

What is a homelab?

Simply put, it’s a server that you run locally that runs various services. Typically these services are docker containers that you can easily spin up and test out. Using docker has made evaluating self-hosted projects extremely easy.

There are many advantages of running your own homelab server, a few being:

  • Privacy - You own all of the data and don’t need to share it with companies.
  • Automation - You can automate many tasks by running containers like Home Assistant, n8n, etc.
  • Quick evaluation of software - There are many self-hosted apps that just need a small docker-compose.yml file to get up and running on your network. I’ve been amazed at how many options are available and the quality of them.

The spark

I started down this path when my Synology NAS was running out of disk space and I was out of bays in the enclosure. I had recently heard about immich, and really wanted to take the plunge in order to migrate away from Google Photos. With the semi-recent news of Synology only supporting their own drives, I started looking into other options.

In the end it was a friend who introduced me to Unraid. He had been using it for a while and gave me a quick demo of his server. I also briefly looked at proxmox and TrueNAS just to get an idea of the options available. I liked the idea of building my own NAS and decided to try Unraid.

The things that I liked about Unraid were:

  • OS loads off of a USB stick and runs in memory, so no need for a HDD just for the OS.
  • Can bring any combo of existing HDDs and create one large pool of data.
  • Has data protection built-in via a parity drive.
  • Has an app store with a ton of docker templated apps that can easily be installed and managed via the UI.
  • Has a large community for answering questions and getting inspiration.

Hardware

I must admit, it had been a long time since I built a computer, so I was a little overwhelmed by the choices. I ended up using components similar to a build from this post: Energy-Efficent Unraid Server Build.

I have a 16U server rack with space in it, so I opted to build a rack-mounted server. I ended up using the following hardware:

I got things together with a little help from an LLM after the board initially didn’t start up. It was user error and the LLM pointed me to the fact that motherboard was not being powered by the PSU.

Unfortunately on first boot, I heard some load clicking and whining from one of the Seagate HDDs. So after tracking down which one it was, I sent it back and received a replacement in a few weeks. It was a bit disappointing to not be able to use my server right away due to the bad HDD, but I patiently waited and eventually had the server up and running.

Future

I have been using the server for about 2 months and am running about 25 docker containers. At this point I have a pretty good knowledge of Unraid and how it operates. I’m not going to go into any install instructions or anything of that nature (there are plenty of youtube channels for that).

For future posts, I’m going to highlight some of the apps I’m running, why I like them and what they are used for. There is so much software out there that you can host yourself that adds a lot of value. Some may even end up replacing commercial software that I currently am paying subscriptions for (more on this in future posts).

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