Self-Hosted Homelab

From an old laptop to a hypervisor

Personal project, 2024 to present.

It started as Ubuntu Server on an old laptop. I later bought a second-hand Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny for 75 euros, fitted my own NVMe SSD, and turned it into a Proxmox VE hypervisor. An Ubuntu Server VM runs my Docker stack, with Nginx Proxy Manager in front and Portainer to manage the containers.

Set up and secured by me

I set up everything myself: SSH hardening, a UFW firewall, Fail2ban, a WireGuard VPN for remote access, and DNS and SSL for my own domain, abeldeloo.dev, through Cloudflare.

This is where most of my Linux, networking and container knowledge comes from, and where I find out what actually breaks once something has to keep running without anyone watching it.

Backups and monitoring

Proxmox Backup Server runs as its own VM on a separate SSD and takes a snapshot of the Docker VM every night. Retention keeps the last 3, plus 7 daily, 4 weekly and 3 monthly backups, and pruning and garbage collection run on a schedule.

For monitoring I run Prometheus with node-exporter and cAdvisor, dashboards in Grafana, and Uptime Kuma to check that each service actually answers.

I have not tested a full restore yet. Until I have, the backups are a promise rather than proof, so that is next. The status bar on this site shows the date of the last restore test once there is one.