My Homelab

Where it all started

It all started (at ~14yo) with a raspberry pi2 from marketplace and home assistant. I always had the interest in computers and soldering, but I just wanted to purchase that small computer and play around. So I had installed home assistant, no other hardware, no use case. At my work they we're throwing out an old motherboard and cpu (i5-6400) because it was used. And so started building my first PC.

My first own built PC

First Rack

Maybe a few weeks after that I had purchased my network rack (9U), put my pc in a server case because hey, that way it's just way prettier. Somewhere in the timeline I got myself a (actually 2 because of a bundle) juniper srx100 to play with.

old switch and old pc / pc with bigger motherboard, so case too small and new router

Asked my parents if I could get a Dell R210 for 100 euros for christmas and after some discussion, they said yes. And god that thing made so much noise, so I kind of only used it for minecraft and some playing around.

First ESP

Came across the board esp32, so I bought one and a relay board. First had it all mounted on a piece of wood, not so long after that I got a cabinet from work that they we're throwing out. And before you know it you have a esp32 controlling a light in your bedroom and a plug that your tv without remote is plugged into.

I believe I didn't use home assistant for like a year, just controlling my light on/off from my phone. Then I got a power meter (pzem-004t) and a temp sensor (dht22) and that got me to work, automating things, sending me notifications when its above 25 degrees for example.

The last picture I have of my first rack

New Rack

Somewhere in the summer of 2023, I saw an advertisement on marketplace of a 42U rack for 150 euro's, in the same period as my birthday. So with some discussion with my parents we had picked up a fucking 42U rack. It had an old 2kw APC UPS with defective batteries, a temp controller and a dumb dell switch. I cleaned and disassembled the rack, with my parents we got the rack to my room and I started building my baby. Why I wanted it? Because its fucking sick to have. I placed my PC in there, R210, and other things. I had an old computer laying around in parts that I didn't do anything with, so after some researching what I could do with it I had installed proxmox (v6). And fell in love, but the computer was just too weak to virtualize Home Assistant, minecraft and who knows what I had at that time.

I also somewhere with my new rack bought an unifi USG and cloudkey gen1, but with a unifi update the gen1 wasn't able to update anymore so I virtualized my cloudkey.

New Server

So I started looking on marketplace for a new server, and the dell R720XD came onto my path. I spent like 250 for a nice deal, got a server and got to work. Installing proxmox, moving my Home Assistant, starting a pterodactyl minecraft server, playing a bit around, stopped using pterodactyl and using crafty. Found out homepage existed, played some around with nginx and pihole. And because I bought a R720XD my previous server had no purpose, but a simple cpu and seperate boot drive and storage drive. So my thought was, I could use Proxmox Backup Server. And thank god, because I had to reinstall Home Assistant after a corrupt update.

Just got a nice system up and running and suddenly I think around the summer of 2025 my proxmox boot ssd stopped working/got corrupted. Apparantly I used a non brand ssd as boot drive, dumb fucking me. But that was my step to move everything to ssd's, bought some samsung and kingston ssd's, and the only hdd left is a 1tb drive left for slow, non important services, and to this day I still don't use it. But because the corrupted ssd I was very happy with my backup server.

SO MAKE SURE YOU BACKUP YOUR DATA!

Defective drive connected in my PC for data transfer

Rebuild

So I had rebuild proxmox, restored my backups, building more services like owncloud and homebox. Buying my own domain, setting up Nginx Proxy Manager and publishing my own site. Maybe a week later I wanted to publish another site but got in trouble with only having 1 domain name. So I wanted to use a sub domain, but I had to change DNS settings, well, apparantly the USG isn't great for DNS settings. I could've built my own DNS server, but I wanted to save myself the hassle because my USG got slower. You know how that sounds, I got a UDM-Pro from marketplace, and I'm happy with my boy. It makes network settings way easier and its also way faster.

Patch, USW-16-POE, UDM-Pro, Cooling / R720XD, PC, Backup, R210 and empty case

If you wonder why this blog is called Joris and his giganotosaurus, well, I named my R720XD giganotosaurus because I saw a lot of people using animals as names for there homelabs. So the domain I bought, is called giganotosaurus.nl. My backup server is called afrovenator (a smaller dinosaurus), because its a smaller but still powerful server.

And now we are to this day, writing this on 06-01-2026 (dd/mm/yyyy), because I wanted to create my own blog. I will discuss every hardware and service I have running in a seperate Homelab post.