How I setup my homelab the second time around

The first version of my homelab crashed and burned when I managed to delete all of its data by deleting a docker volume, and with no backups made because I hadn't bothered yet, it was time to just start from scratch.

This time, I thought, I would be smarter.

What I didn't know at the time I started setting up my homelab again was that the second part of the 3-2-1 rule, having one of the backups off-site, really does matter.

Let's do it smarter

After my lazyness had finally caught up to me and I had deleted all of the data on my homelab, I had a couple of weeks where I just didn't bother setting up my homelab again - I was very demotivated.

But, as these things go, after a while of watching YT videos and my coworkers telling me about their homelabs, I kinda wanted to try again, but this time I wanted to be smarter.

Not wanting to have the same experience with all of my data leaving the place I want it in, I really wanted something that made backups easy so I could, well, get it back up and running. What was also kind of important to me was that setting stuff up would be really easy, as I was still a beginner at this whole "homelab" thingy.

Because of the built-in backup functionality and amazing community scripts, I was really interested in Proxmox and so simply put the ISO on a USB stick, and stuck it into my old PC that had gone unused since I managed to banish my first homelab's data out of existence.

The installation really was simple, though I was a little irritated that it asked for my email, and it took less than ten minutes until I could reach the web interface from another device on the network. Awesome stuff.

What was not simple was trying to set up that it is accessible from the internet, which I really wanted so I could use it on the go.

After discovering that static IPs are not a thing for residential addresses, I gave up on that aspect pretty quickly - I did not want to bother setting up DDNS.

But what I also discovered was just how easy the community scripts make things! Just curl into bash whatever the website says, and boom, all of a sudden you have a new LXC that does things for you!

Uhh, yeah - at the start I really looked at the scripts, as you probably should when just curling something into bash, but pretty soon I found myself just installing random software I thought could be kinda cool. Docker host? Check. Adguard? Yup. Ohh, Gitea! Oh I can just setup Open WebUI, cool.

After several hours of me installing stuff I didn't really need, I felt the kind of buzz you get when you've discovered something awesome that expanded your horizons and gave you lots and lots of things to do - it was awesome.

Ah right, backups.

A couple of days in I finally remembered that while this is fun and games, I really did want this to be useful for me and not lose all my data again.

I followed a guide on how to not shoot myself in the foot while setting up local backups, went to bed and was pleasantly surprised when, the next morning, I had an email in my inbox saying the backups had worked. I was slightly perplexed because I didn't know how the hell it even knew my email, but then remembered that I added it during the Proxmox setup process - I had a really pleasant "so that's what that was for!"-moment.

So far, Proxmox had lived up to be as great as everyone says, and better than I expected.

This worked quite well, until I decided to play around with OpenCode.

To be continued