State of the homelab
I started on my homelab not too long ago during Thanksgiving. It has been a crazy journey, but I have made some good progress. Today is the last day of 2025, and I want to document the state of my homelab and what is coming in 2026.
Hardware
Building a media server was the first milestone in my homelab this year. I had a 2018 Mac mini that was no longer worth much as a trade-in. I had wanted to repurpose this machine into a server for a while now but never invested the time.
I didn’t want to spend money on a professional NAS and wanted something cheaper to start experimenting with. To keep things simple I installed Debian and OpenMediaVault on the Mac mini, and it is currently a media server, an application server, and my NAS. It isn’t easy to expand the Mac mini storage and after some research I went with a Cenmate 4 Bay HDD enclosure, which currently houses three 4TB HDD drives, connected to the server with Thunderbolt.
I tried to use Unraid but it doesn’t play nicely with drives over USB-C, so I opted for MergeFS + SnapRAID. I use one of the 4 TB drives as SnapRAID parity and use MergeFS to present the other two drives as a singular drive.
This isn’t the bad setup for smaller disks, and it gave me close to 8 TB of usable space, but SnapRAID can only recover files written before its last snapshot. I will probably need a better storage solution in the future.
Network
To accommodate the homelab, I upgraded from the Nighthawk RAX70 WiFi router to an Ubiquity EdgeRouter 4 and turned the WiFi router into an access point.
The WiFi access point wasn’t properly configured (I didn’t read the manual when I purchased), so I spent some time configuring it when turned it into an access point.
- Enabled OFDMA which is pretty much the reason to upgrade to WiFi 6
- Reconnected all the devices so the appropriate band is chosen
- Used linssid to relocate each band to a less crowded channel
Software
After setting everything up, I went on a self-hosted shopping spree and added many applications. All of the applications are currently running using Docker Compose on the Mac mini, with Traefik for routing and Authentik for SSO and OIDC. The deployment workflow is pretty simple at the moment: I use Komodo to pull the compose files from Git to deploy them.
Here’s my favorite apps on the stack:
- Immich - Google Photos replacement
- NextCloud - GSuite replacement
- CommaFeed - RSS reader
- Karakeep - Bookmarks
- HomeAssistant - Smart home
- TubeArchivist - YouTube archiver
- OpenWebUI - ChatGPT replacement
- Servarr - Media management
- Plex - Media server
2026 Goals
As I continue to learn more, my goals will evolve. I just bought 4 * Rasberry Pi 5, 2 * HP Elitedesk 800 G3, and a NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin so I will be busy adding them to my homelab.
In 2026 I want to:
- Build an application k3s cluster (Pi / Elitedesk)
- Setup local AI (Jetson)
- Self-host smart speakers
- Plan long term storage solution
- Fully automate tasks