Complete Homelab Tour 2025

Click to enlarge - Merox Homelab

Hardware Overview

Power Protection

Network Stack

Compute Resources

Network Architecture

Simple but Effective Design

I’ve kept my network intentionally simple - no VLANs or complex routing (yet). Three dedicated physical interfaces on pfSense handle everything:

1
WAN Interface → Orange ISP (Bridge Mode)
2
LAN Interface → Homelab Network
3
WiFi Interface → Guest/IoT Isolation

Network Topology

Here’s how everything connects together. The key insight: Tailscale creates a flat network across all locations:

Click to enlarge - Full network topology including Tailscale mesh connections

Self-Hosted Applications and Services

Core Infrastructure

pfSense

The heart of my network - a fanless mini PC from AliExpress (~200€) running pfSense for 3+ years:

👉 XCY X44 on AliExpress

Tailscale Subnet Router Exposes the entire homelab to cloud VPS without installing Tailscale on every device. Perfect solution for CGNAT (Carrier-Grade NAT) bypass - when your ISP doesn’t give you a public IP address.

Setup guide →

Unbound DNS Local recursive resolver with domain overrides for *.k8s.merox.dev pointing to K8s-Gateway.

Telegraf Pushes system metrics to Grafana for monitoring dashboards.

Network Security

• WiFi → LAN: Block all except some self-hosted apps
• LAN → WAN: Allow all
• WAN → Internal: Block all except exposed services

Power Management with CyberPower UPS

Managing power for the critical infrastructure - the CyberPower 1000VA protects all mini PCs and network equipment:

Power Management Features

Telegram Integration

Instant notifications keep me informed of power events wherever I am:

Storage Solutions

Synology DS223+ - Reliable NAS Storage

The reliable storage backbone - serving dual purposes in my infrastructure:

Media Storage

• Protocol: SMB/NFS shares (experimenting with both)
• Purpose: Central storage for ARR stack
• Access: Mounted directly in Kubernetes pods and Docker containers

Personal Cloud After 3 years of self-hosting Nextcloud, I switched to Synology Drive for a more polished experience:

• Better performance than my Nextcloud instance
• Native mobile apps that actually work reliably
• Set-and-forget reliability for family photos/documents
• 2TB RAID1 protection for peace of mind

Dell R720: From AI Experiments to Backup Server

The power-hungry beast of the homelab - this old datacenter workhorse has served many purposes over the past year:

Evolution of Use Cases

Hardware Modifications

The most interesting project was flashing the RAID controller to IT mode - completely bypassing hardware RAID for direct disk access. IT mode allows the operating system to see drives directly rather than through a RAID abstraction layer.

Remote Management

iDRAC Enterprise makes this server a joy to manage remotely:

Current Role: Off-site Backup Target

Given the ~200W idle power consumption, I’ve implemented a smart scheduling system:

• Power Schedule: Wake-on-LAN 1-2× weekly
• Sync Task: Pull MinIO backups from Hetzner VPS
• Storage: RAID-Z2 for redundancy
• 3-2-1 Rule: Completes my backup strategy

Still constantly changing my mind about what to run here

Virtualization Platform

Proxmox - The Compute Foundation

The compute playground of my homelab - a small but mighty 3-node cluster spread across my mini PCs.

Current Virtual Machines

Smart Home Integration

While I have various IoT devices, my Home Assistant setup is intentionally minimal(for the moment). The most interesting automation? Location-based server fan control:

• Phone at home → Dell R720 fans run quieter
• Away from home → Fans ramp up for better cooling

Infrastructure Distribution

Each Proxmox node runs one Talos VM, ensuring:

• High availability across physical hosts
• Balanced resource utilization
• No single point of failure for Kubernetes

Cloud Infrastructure

Extending beyond the homelab walls - strategic cloud deployments for resilience and global reach:

Infrastructure Overview

All managed through a single Portainer instance at cloud.merox.dev:

cloud-de (Hetzner VPS)

The always-on sentinel watching over my homelab:

homelab-ro (Local Docker)

The emergency escape hatch - when Kubernetes complexity becomes too much:

Because sometimes you just need things to work without debugging YAML manifests at 2 AM

cloud-usa (Oracle Free Tier)

The wildcard instance leveraging Oracle’s generous free tier:

• Testing ground for experimental Docker images
• Tailscale exit node for US geo-location
• Not in Portainer - hit the 5-node limit (3× Kubernetes + 2× Docker)

Container Orchestration

Talos & Kubernetes - Enterprise-Grade at Home

Fair warning: This is where I went full “because I can” mode. If you just want to run services, stick with Docker. But if you want to learn enterprise-grade container orchestration…

The Journey to Over-Engineering

After diving deeper into Kubernetes automation, I discovered this magic: onedr0p/cluster-template

My Infrastructure Repository

Fork and customize: 👉 github.com/meroxdotdev/infrastructure

Key Customizations

GitOps Structure

1
infrastructure/kubernetes/apps/
2
├── storage/          # Longhorn configuration
3
├── observability/    # Prometheus, Grafana, Loki (WIP)
4
└── default/          # Production workloads

Click to enlarge - Grafana and Loki dashboard example

Cluster Management with Lens

For day-to-day Kubernetes management, I use Lens - it provides a beautiful overview of the entire cluster health, resource usage, and running workloads:

Deployed Applications

Homepage Dashboard

My centralized view of everything (work in progress on the organization):

Automation Benefits

With this setup, I can completely rebuild my cluster in 8-9 minutes:

• Clean: Declarative configuration for everything
• Organized: GitOps workflow with Flux
• Sustainable: Renovate bot keeps dependencies updated
• Reproducible: All configs in Git

Backup Strategy

Daily automated backups ensure data persistence:

• Longhorn PVCs → Daily backup to MinIO on R720

• MinIO on R720 → Weekly sync to Hetzner Storagebox
• Result: Complete 3-2-1 backup strategy

For detailed deployment instructions, check out the excellent onedr0p/cluster-template README - it’s surprisingly straightforward to follow.

What’s Next

All these being said, this is my homelab and I hope you really enjoyed it or it helped you in any way. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to write down a comment to ask me, I’ll be happy to help :)