What are your Homelab goals for 2025?

Got a 3 year old kid with another on the way. I just need it to be reliable so the kid can watch Sesame Street and the lights keep working.

I want to move my whole server to NixOS. It's gotten to the point where I have no idea where all the Ubuntu config files went, and handling half of it via Docker vs baremetal. I hope this will allow me to set up proper backups as well, and maybe get better at Nix! I started a few days ago using the VM feature, but it's tricky to work on for now, perhaps I haven't found the right workflow.
- I went this route from the start and love it. In case you need some resources:
  VimJoyer is excellent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a67Sv4Mbxmc
  Do secrets using SOPS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5f6GC7SnhU
  NixOS and Restic are an amazing combination, full backups in 20 lines of config. This article was my best find for this: https://francis.begyn.be/blog/nixos-restic-backups . Tip: you can easily write systemd services to trigger each software's preferred backup strategy and simply schedule them to run before the Restic backup - I have them all copy the backups to one folder that then Restic backs up, works great for me!
  Hope this helps a bit. I found the effort to be very worth it, but took me almost half a year to get comfortable with it.
  
  Another vote for restic, best backup software I've ever used.
  
  Thank you! It definitely does, I will be using that Restic article for sure! I actually use NixOS on my main laptop, which I found via Vimjoyer's videos. It's great, though I wish documentation for more advanced usage was more readily available. I started making the server, currently my biggest roadblock is testing the infrastructure without going live (I made the flake generate a VM for now but it takes a long time to build it every edit and I can't even get ssh working) and figuring out how I'll eventually install it with minimal downtime.
- Is there a reason(s) you’re doing NixOS over something like ProxMox? A friend of mine has been moving his lab over to ProxMox containers so i was thinking to do the same thing, but curious about NixOS since I’ve seen a few people mention it. Thanks!
  
  The entirety of Nix configuration is in somewhere between 1 and 3 files depending on how you like your poison.
  It's immutable, so stuff can't just change on you.
  Every change you make is stored into a new configuration and you can roll back to any configuration you've ever done with a reboot, so it's kind of hard to brick it.
  Apps can't just go in and modify your users or your host table or any of the other configs so it's got an extra layer of security. But then, the package system has more packages than God and is maintained by a million randos with very little oversight.
  It has some substantially neat tricks. I moved from one box to another by just doing a fresh install, moving its three configuration files and letting syncthing rebuild my home directory from my other box.
  I think, if I were going to use Nix as a home server, I just install all of the services directly on the OS. Updates and configurations for everything would be maintained by Nix itself.
  
  Nix is great if your fine with the packages and configuration they provide. If you want other stuff or features not provided it is a giant pain in the ass and not worth it. And you'll get oh just write a flake or just write a package file for it.
- Tried it didn't like it. To much work to get somethings working. Went back to docker.

Might get around to tidying this 20-year-old mess up a bit - tho I'm not sure where to start lol.
I am not a proud man.
- I appreciate you posting your balls like this.
  Fuck it it works. Lol

Buying a 16 TB hard drive for... purposes.
- You can say piracy here, it's a safe space. Or, ya know, porn.
  
  Both tbh.

I think what I need to do correctly on my homelab this year, is setup off-site backups. I currently only backup to seperate drives and machines inside my own home. I need to setup something at my parents place to take weekly and monthly backups.
Other than that, my media server needs a bigger storage drive.
- Hetzner storage box is super cheap and works with rclone. They have a web interface for configuring regular zfs snapshots too so you don't have to worry about accidental deletions/ransomware.
  
  True. I'd have to get the €11/month box for it though. It's cheaper to set up one of my Raspberry Pi's with an external drive I already have. I just need to figue out how it's best to transfer and dedublicate the data. :)
- I got no backups ao ur doing better than me. If 1 ssd dies there goes all my data.
- Backups are key! Need to work on this myself too!
- I did this recently. Opendrive is free up to 5 gb and works with rclone. All I'm backing up is the config and data needed to recreate my containerized services. I've even had to recreate them from the backup, once.
- I snagged an old fiber LTO5 drive.. just got to work out how to get it powered and then spend hours fiddling with silly old tapes.

Actually have a decent backup system and data repetition
- This, my ssd randomly disappeared on my proxmox server January 1st so I had to start from scratch. Didn't have any docker compose backups or lxc backups..... I suppose this time I can do everything right now lol
  
  Do git :)

get around cgnat finally
- Tailscale? 👉👈 🥺
  
  That's what I'm currently using and it doesn't cut it, especially for streaming movies
- Literally just finished configuring headscale on a free (pay as you go) oracle vps because I'm behind cgnat. Getting tailscale on pfsense to connect to a headscale server was a chore but finally got it.
  
  I'm using tailscale now and yeah, their relay servers are very spotty. I do have an ampere free tier just sitting around that i was planning to use as a relay for an overlay network, but that's all been in the planning phase all year.
- New provider, VPS, or CloudFlare tunnels.

Learn how to design an implement effective segmentation for my network, get better with OPNsense, and get my private website up and running
- I had a blast learning and configuring vlans for my smart switch and putting all the IOT devices on their own network.
  
  Do you happen to remember what learning resources you used?

Start setting one up.
- Have fun!
- Same!

Moving to a rack is nice, I love my rack. If you’re in or near a city I suggest keeping an eye on Craigslist and ebay (search by distance nearest and lowball ones that have been sitting for months) because it’s not uncommon for nice racks to go real cheap as long as you come get them. I got my rack realllll cheap ($40, 42u, fully enclosed with massive pdu) because it’s a 90s ibm rack and it’s welded steel so it’s like 450lbs. Moving it was a nightmare but it’s real sturdy and I’m never moving it again now that it’s in my basement
For my goals in the short term I have to replace a sas cable that caused a crc error on one drive, it only happened once per smart data but still want to get that done asap. I also have another drive that’s beginning to show some smart issues; it’s on the same sas cable so it may be related because the errors didn’t increase (they all were related to an unclean shutdown, confusing things) but it’s old anyway so better safe than sorry I guess.
Medium term I want to finally upgrade my ups. The one I have now is not a rack mount which is part of what led to the unclean shutdown. It’s also a bit undersized. I have a generator for my house so I don’t need something massive but the one I have is 450va and several years old so with the tired battery I only can get about 5m of runtime. It’s more than enough to cover the transfer from power cutting out to generator power but I want something that’s a bit more reliable in case of generator failure. This is pricey though because my array is pretty huge so it’ll probably be held off unless I find a good deal on a dead one that has cheap batteries available
I also want to put the rack on its own circuit. This is something I should do asap because it’s cheap, just gotta find time and rearrange my panel a bit because it’s pretty full. This would be the other part of the unclean shutdown as the outlet would be in a much better location and I could also install a locking outlet
Would also be nice to pick up a super cheap monitor locally, like something for $15-20 from a pawn shop or Craigslist or something for the rack. Earlier this year I had nginx crash on my server and the webui became inaccessible, I had to drag my nice and kind of large desktop monitor down to the basement to solve the issue, would be nice to just have a shitty small monitor on the rack for that
Speaking of nginx I keep meaning to setup some kind of reverse proxy or mdns for all my dockers so that I can just do whatever.whatever instead ipaddress:3993 which makes my password managers barf but I’ll probably just be lazy and edit my hosts file
Longer term I want to add a secondary low power server that can run something like pfsense to handle my routing, then turn my current wireless routers into access points because they kind of suck as routers.
And of course the array could always be bigger, especially if drive prices fall
I will probably realistically only do the drive and cable replacement, the circuit thing since that’ll be like $40 and a half hour of work, the monitor if I can find one, and maybe the hosts file thing. If I run into cash (unlikely) or a crazy deal (you never know) the ups would be my next priority but there’s a million other things going in life (deductibles just reset for health insurance, hooray)
- Nginx is pretty simple to run as a reverse proxy. Caddy is even easier but not as scalable. HAProxy looks intimidating at first but it's pretty easy and very scalable and performant. Wendell from Level1Techs has a nice writeup on their forums
- "I'm never moving it again...". As a larger guy that owns a pickup truck, I wish I had a nickel for everytime I heard that about a big rack I help move. (Or a baby grand piano, pool table, or gun safe) :)
- ipvlan / macvlan containers?
- For the nginx reverse proxy - that's how I ran things prior to moving to microk8s. If you want I can dig out some config examples. The trick for me was to set up host based stanzas, then update my internal DNS to have A records for each docker service pointing to the same docker host.
  With Kubes + external-dns + nginx ingress, I can just do a deployment/service/ingress and things automatically work now.

Finally get a cheap mini PC so I can stop running my gaming rig 24/7 for jellyfin. Looking to start self hosting few other services if that goes well.
- A relatively newish SBC can run Jellyfin and even do some light transcoding (single stream full HD or 2-3 streams SD).
  
  Any particular spec requirement I would need? There are a lot of them in used market but I am not sure what I need.
- Same mate.

I want to replace my single drive Qnap NAS by a diy one. It still works, but I also want to redo my backup process, and it would be a good point to start.
- Omg.. I have the EXACT same goal. Qnap and make a better offsite backup process... Been procrastinating for years now
  I'm thinking a diy NAS running openmediavault.
  Currently doing encrypted backups to google storage archive tier. Very cheap to store, expensive to retrieve.
  Thinking maybe i can set up a small box at a family members house for nightly backups

Goals: keep it running

don't break stuff
upgrade to microOS from Leap, without violating step 1
reduce the physical footprint of my server (currently in a massive case, would like to go to mini-ITX)
My city is also planning to roll out fiber, so upgrading my network may become a priority if that happens. My current ISP is limited to 100mbps, but I should be able to get 10gbit once they hook me up (though I'll probably stop well short of that).

Hardware perspective i need a nas. I got myself some piece of acer oem thats not too shit just need a case and some drives (i dont wanna just make stack of drives on top of the stack of old oems i call a homelab).
Am getting starlink installed cos shitty rural aussie internet is shit. So gonna have to do some fucking around to make that work.
Would like some local media reccommendation algorithm (can probs just write some code to dump jellyfin into openwebui and task an llm).
Gotta set up an image gen ai and hook that up to openwebui.
Gotta set up an email server to make authelia notifications not just dumped to a file.
Ohh and i got literaly no backups of anything (well except my docker composes that are on git).
Other than that we will see what i want.

docker-ify everything, my nginx, nextcloud, pihole, jellyfin, and basically everything else is a nightmare and I can't even begin to understand how to modify the shit that ~~2023 me did~~ 2023 chatgpt spat out, so having everything in some neat docker composes is gonna help immensly
also making the Pi that everything's hosted on boot of an SSD instead of a cheap chinese SD card, but that requires money and I'm all out
- I docker'd all of my systems a few years ago, and I'm so glad I did. So much easier to manage, and when I lost a system I was able to get most of my services back up and running with minimal configuration on a VM same day.
  As for hardware, you might check and see if you've got a local reseller of retired business equipment. Before I moved, I had a place I went to from my work that accepted shit we were getting rid of that disposed of stuff and resold at a bargain the stuff that was still good. I got more than one hp tower from a few years previous that ran (and still runs) like a champ. Felt like night and day when I upgraded to that from my Pi setup, and they were only like $35 each.
  
  the pi's serving me very well for now, load average at idle 0.01 and when doing stuff it hovers at around 50, temps under 40°C even under load and an extremely low noise level (not to mention the almost non-existent power draw)
  if one day I decide to go full homelab with proxmox and stuff i might buy a dedicated tower but I don't see the appeal atm

Centralised identity management, particularly for machine logon, NFS and maybe a few of the services I run.
- Yeah I've been toying with FreeIPA for IdM, Keycloak for SSO, and Netbird to create a zero trust internal network. DNS is the hurdle I'm currently figuring my way over
  
  Ha, DNS is the only one of those that I have sorted. I have some reading to do.

I just want jellyfin to organize media properly.
Permissions ok, it detects the fils in the software, then the folders are just empty. I know its my incompetence but been bashing my head against that wall a while.
Certain media categories fix 1 or two podcasts and then other categories break the ones that it fixed.
Naming conventions? Metadata? File types?
One day
- So many tv shows broken by two-part episodes!
- I love Jellyfin (kind of love/hate haha), but I would never trust it to manage my media files themselves.
  
  Is there a way to make a media folder without categorizing it?
  Even the "home video and photos" which usually picks up everything struggles with some mp3 podcasts.

Moving my servers to Arch (EOS) as my trial for one during 2024 was successful, rock solid. Swapping my router to a Unifi Express as I am switching to an ISP which finally allows me to do so.
- What is the advantage of an arch based server over Debian ?
  
  I had the unfortunate experience that major upgrades on Debian did break the system twice alreay (different servers though). Doing small, incremental package upgrades seems like less of a risk, I can more easily track major package upgrades.
  Also it is my homelab, not a production environment, a place where I try new things and play around. So curiosity is always a reason as to why I do things as well.

finish setting it up
I have all the hardware laying around collecting dust
- The fun part is putting it together and watching it all work smoothly! Best of luck dude 👍
  
  I loathe to grind all the software setup, it's so dull, yet I have to concentrate to not fuck anything up.
  Just wanted to vent.
  Thank you 🫰

Add some redundancy to it.
Find a way to copy my iCloud files to Nextcloud.

I have a dual socket R620 with 256gb RAM that I never turn on (proxmox) and another box with a single xeon 1518d (esxi). Collapsing both down to a repurposed Sophos SG135 (atom c3558) with 32g ram, 512gb sata and a noctua fan (proxmox). I already use another sg135 running opnsense. I run mostly lightweight loads anymore (HomeAssistant, netbox, unifi controller) so I really don't need things turned on that have overkill horsepower. I have a separate file server that I need to upgrade sometime (old 4 core bulldozer amd) but it keeps chugging away.

Transition my main host to Linux, maybe Plex to Jellyfin, setup a switch (have an RS900 and access to acquire a free CS2960), a UPS or two. I may also wind up getting my hands on some PoE cameras and APs. Run some cable too.
- Nice dude! Jellyfin has defo been a nice change for me which i switched to during 2024.
  
  I don't really need all the fluff that Plex has but the only thing holding me back is no PS5 support.

Deprecate the Raspberry Pi entry point for incoming traffic, move to NUC instead.
Switch from PiHole to Adguard
Move IoT equipment to separate VLAN
- What are the reasons for the Pi Hole to Adguatd switch?
  
  I have the same question. It seems like a step backwards.
  
  Adguard has a more polished UI and has a bunch of nicer features that Pi Hole doesn't. The most important one for me being able to use it as a DNS remotely (eg: my phone) without a VPN.

To start - moving services from bare metal to rootless Podman containers running via quadlets. It's something I have had in mind for a while but keep second guessing the distro choice. Long-ish release cadence, systemd-networkd and a recent Podman version in the native repos, well supported, and not Ubuntu.
So far openSUSE Leap seems like the winner. A testing machine is up to install everything, write some deployment scripts, and decide on a storage layout and partitioning scheme.
If anyone has another distro to recommend that checks these boxes let me know!
I like rolling release for the desktop, but only want critical patches in any given month for this server, and a major upgrade no more than every 3-4 years. Or an immutable server distro. But it doesn't seem like networkd is an option for the ones I've looked at (Fedora CoreOS, openSUSE MicroOS), and I am not sure if I want to figure out Ignition/Combustion right now.
Next project - VLANs on Mikrotik.
OP - Navepoint makes good racks for reasonable money. I have a Pro series 9u from them and it went together without any problems. It's on the wall with a pretty big ups in it.
- Thanks for the recommendation!
  If I hadn't been using Unraid for my server I too think I'd be rocking OpenSuse, but probably MicroOS as you mentioned.

10gb network, a second proxmox host and outside backup
Thank you, I didn’t realize I needed goals

Replace Blue Iris with Frigate + Coral
Set up Immich with proper backups
Set up Peertube
Increase my storage pool to fit 100% of my local backups.
Nearline my critical backups
Move my remote backups from BackBlaze to synctoy untrusted crypt on a pie at work.
- Frigate and a Coral TPU work amazing. I've had them and Home Assistant setup for the last year or so and have been quite happy.

Get a domain and set about moving over to HTTPS with Let's encrypt and Nginx.
Learn to write an Nginx config. NPM just works so good though.
Fix my permission issues. I have my media zpool on 777 so all the LXCs work and I have to run Libation in a VM as root. I've been banging my head against this on and off for a while.
Figure out why paperless isn't saving to the correct place. Also, figure out where Paperless is saving to.
Containerise Libation.
I give friends and family access to my server via a relay, just a raspberry pi 0 with Tailscale, pihole and nginx on it. I have reasons for going this route. Anyways, get a couple more of those into the wild. Also streamline the process somewhat.
Learn to and create an ACL config for tailscale so I can have services access nothing, users access services, and admins access everything.
- Why not caddy?
  
  Momentum really. I'm on NPM now, it works and it's great. I didn't put much thought into it. I'm generally happy with npm, it's mostly just something to learn next and plain nginx made sense.
- Check out traefik as an alternative to nginx or npm

Double Storage space (Done!)
Done for the year already!

My server is exactly as I need. Basically 1 year old now. This year I really want to do vlans to control the network more than an off the shelf router. I work in tech and still am struggling because all I know is meraki bullshit and that's not priced for the typical home user.
I'll need a few AP's and a switch and firewall. I don't know what to get or what to buy and each research session ends with more options than I started with. Anyway that's my goal. I'll get there eventually.

From a hardware perspective I need more storage. Am thinking I'll probably end up with a second Synology NAS unit before the end of the year with 4 hard drives at whatever a reasonable price vs size point it at the time I do it (likely 12-14Tb drives at this stage). Bought drives 2 at a time last time so I'm running two RAID1 pairs right now on the existing unit - adding 4 new drives at once to the home lab will let me move all that content to the new drives and reformat the existing ones into a RAID5 array and get an extra 12Tb of storage.
The one I already have does support adding the 5 drive expansion bay, but figuring that with a second NAS I can move some of my Docker instances currently running on a dedicated laptop onto the second NAS which takes one computer out of the setup as well.
Maintenance wise I've just only done my 2024 maintenance stuff that I do each year. This year it was going through my password vault and making sure everything was synced up, had complex passwords, had two factor enabled where applicable, etc, as well as setting up unique email addresses for every service I'm using (they just forward to the same inbox) to help me track who's been selling my info. Have already found a local fast food outlet who has from that.
Have also rotated all my SSH keys, made sure they were all upgraded to Ed25519 from RSA, set up unique keys for the three devices I regularly use so I can revoke one individually if required, made sure all my hardware was running the latest updates (my RPi running my Pi-hole instance was still on Buster so I had to get that updated before I could even update Pi-hole), etc.
Also swapped my Mullvad connection on my gateway to use Wireguard instead of OpenVPN since they're dropping support later this year.
Honestly I'd love to invest in some sort of rack mounting for home, its something I should look into some more, but right now I just have a whole section of the wardrobes in my study for equipment and tech storage. It's working for now although I worry about it in summer with not a massive amount of heat dissipation in there. This weekend is supposed to be close to 40 degrees Celsius both days 🥵
- In 2025 RAID does not work. It will not protect you from errors. it's all a mirage. The only sane option these days is ZFS.
  
  I've got ZFS on my older NAS which is a FreeNAS box I build myself a while back (an old HP N40L), the Synology one is using BTRFS (only because it doesn't support ZFS). That being said, I'm well aware of bitrot, the RAID is to protect against a drive dying, and the vast majority of stuff on the NAS is stuff where a flipped bit isn't going to be the end of the world even if the file system doesn't catch it. For stuff that's more important I keep multiple copies of it or and/or have a backup in the cloud.

I need to get off ESXi and onto....Proxmox i guess. Xcp-ng is great except no virtual network switches.
- Eh, xcp-ng runs open vSwitch
  https://docs.xcp-ng.org/networking/
  
  Well heck, I hadn't really figured that outm . also I need to learn containers so proxmox might still be the thing

Migrate from Unraid in a massive tower to a proper JBOD rig in a rack. Finally set up ARM SBC k8s cluster for most things alongside the old x86 hardware for a few services and running the NAS as I don't know how I'd hook that up to the SBCs.
- Definitely check out k3s. I ran a 7 node arm64 cluster for a couple years and it served me well. I’ve since graduated to proxmox/ceph and all that, wish me luck 😅
  
  Ya I'm actually running k3s on em now but they dont do much as I'm switching them all over to eMMC or m.2 storage for the os.
  I've installed k8s manually before and that's a fools errand. K3s is so much smoother.
  Its a group of rock64 and old pi. Picked up a new orange pi5 as well so itll be a three server node k3s setup.
  I was evaluating ceph but I think its overkill for my use. Too many drives needed 😅. I'm okay with parity and none of the data stored is irreplaceable. The stuff that is is off site backed up.
  I really just want to mimic the Unraid drive setup and move to infra as code as its easier for me to maintain.
  I may end up with proxmox in the end who knows.

While not really for my hosting, I want to upgrade the Wi-Fi speeds in my home, currently running an eero setup that provides good coverage, but the speed seems poor when transferring large files around the home.
Not sure what to get, but this is my goal.
- Great goal! Good networking is jolly important. Best of luck bud :)
- Wired backhaul?
  
  You mean run wires?

Hopefully I can finally get the IPv6 stack fully working.
OPNsense works, Proxmox works, LXC works, Docker works but Docker Swarm does not.
Either I move away from Docker Swarm or a miracle happens and they finally fix their IPv6 support in 2025.
- As a networking noob: what are the benefits to having/using an IPv6 stack? I realize that eventually we all have to move to IPv6, but any point in being early on it?
  
  IPv6 is pretty much identical to IPv4 in terms of functionality.
  The biggest difference is that there is no more need for NAT with IPv6 because of the sheer amount of IPv6 addresses available. Every device in an IPv6 network gets their own public IP.
  For example: I get 1 public IPv4 address from my ISP but 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 IPv6 addresses. That's a number I can't even pronounce and it's just for me.
  There are a few advantages that this brings:
  Any client in the network can get a fresh IP every day to reduce tracking
  It is pretty much impossible to run a full network scan on this amount of IP addresses
  Every device can expose their own service on their own IP (For example: You can run multiple web servers on the same port without a reverse proxy or multiple people can host their own game server on the same port)
  There are some more smaller changes that improve performance compared to IPv4, but it's minimal.
  
  I love havingipv6. Hard to learn and had roadblocks but now that it's set up works fine.
  Does it matter no but just nice to know I have it figured out.

Right now it's really just setting up DNScrypt, and maybe swapping some equipment out for lower power consumption.

Thinking about setting up a NixOS or Guix firewall/router. I like OpenWRT but upgrades are a bit annoying, although should improve with the new packaging system.
The idea of having a single config file I can deploy on new hardware almost immediately is very appealing, however.
- NixOS is really good

Hardware-wise:
Reorganize my networking closet and rack up my switches
Replace my core switch with 10 gbit, connect up 10Gbit fiber to my laptop dock and one of my nodes still on copper
Add 3 more nodes to my cluster with nvme storage so that I can start an erasure-coding pool in ceph.
Software wise, too many projects to count lol

Second NAS - I've filled up the first one.

Replace proxmox with incus.
- I'm on proxmox too and now very curious as to why you want to move to incus.
  
  same
  
  Given the topic, the response and the location I'm going to go with "because it seems neat and could be fun".
  Now, since I now know if it I'm going to give it a crack. 😆

Buy a home.

Many goals, little time, so we'll see what actually materializes 😅
Reimplement my Grafana+Loki stack on public cloud, replace Promtail with a proper Prometheus pipeline (queries are making my qnap go brrr)
Start up an Immich instance and migrate Google photos to it
Set up Authentik or something equivalent for the aforementioned services and others. I already have a basic Traefik test config without authentication but still don't have it working 100%, so everything stays on TailScale for now
- Traefik+immich+Authelia here, works good. You can use the traefik bypass secret header to let Immich through authelia.
  Probably possible in some fashion with authentik too, haven't tried it yet.

I'm still in the middle of a K8s migration. It's overkill for a home user, but I want the upskilling.
I've got a QNAP NAS with self-managed linux for storage, and a MS-01 with an RTX A2000 for compute. They're connected over 10Gb SFP+. I'm more than half way done, especially considering I mostly know what I'm doing now.
I still need to figure out the idiomatically right way to schedule pods with their storage, but I got GPU workloads going recently. Next up is migrate the last of the docker-compose from the storage node.

I want to build a whole new server, starting with a wooden case that makes it perfectly silent (but allows for good air flow).
Btw: does anybody know what bad things actually happen if there is no metal cage that blocks all the radio?
- Never good to intentionally pollute.
- Btw: does anybody know what bad things actually happen if there is no metal cage that blocks all the radio?
  Noise happens. Could be no problem, or it could hurt your wifi or mobile data connections, or maybe raise a neighbor's ham radio noise floor. I saw this recently when setting up a pi to run BirdNet-Pi. The USB3 connection to an SSD caused enough noise in the 2.4GHz band that the onboard wifi radio could only connect on the 5GHz band.

Buy a NAS , sell my old gaming pc (acting as 1 node in my proxmox cluster of 2), buy a second mini pc, learn more about backups and fallbacks and all that fun stuff

I am doing exactly the same as what the OP is doing. In addition to that, I will unify my beelink mini PC proxmox server and our old Intel atom NAS into one rack server with AMD EPYC, proxmox and truenas in a VM.
I sure hope our landlord and the Internet operator can agree on the operator finally bringing fiber cables to all apartments. Then I would have fast enough uplink to my homelab.
- I'm begging for fiber too! It's 2025 gosh darn it 😁
  
  Yeah... So I'm in Berlin, and in Germany the internet operators finally are building fiber everywhere. The provider who lays the fiber to our street is Deutsche Telekom, and they promise to pay everything: laying the fiber, bringing it to our house and bringing the fiber to every apartment for a two year monopoly on fiber internet after which it's up for competition using their cables. What needs to happen next is our landlord (a Swiss company) and house management company to agree on these guys to come in, put little fiber dividers to every floor and drill a hole to the walls so we get the fiber cable to our apartment.
  Of course this being Germany, they are very slow on agreeing on that, we might need to go to court and for sure we need to talk to our neighbors who own their apartments to push them a bit. I'd expect us to get the connection maybe before end of 2025. But eventually it will happen...
  
  And here I am stuck in an apartment in NYC with one option.. spectrum cable. That's it. I mean you COULD get Verizon DSL (lol) or some horrendously overpriced LTE thing, but realistically you're at the mercy of whatever bloodsucking landlord thinks you deserve.

Rebuilding my main router to work with 10gbe fiber that recently became available here. Although it is a tad expensive, so I am not actually sure yet if I will upgrade my contract.

Get VLANs working, proper IOT network isolation, and Nextcloud as my primary document storage. If that first one didn't bring down my homelab entry time I try I'd be more inclined.
- VLANs for the win! Was a difficult process for me too when i first setup my Omada stack, but got there in the end. Very nice to have it sorted. While you're at it, you might want to look into having a seperate wifi for guests! I at least have a very limited guest wifi, with a QR code guests can scan when they come in to my house - neat little thing for them, plus i dont have to worry about their devices on my network.

Top 1 for me would be a strong backup mechanism, and by that I mean something that is tested. Currently I have restic in place but I don't even know if in case of a disaster the backups are ok.
And considering my lack of time, I would be happy with just that.

I will be moving my entire homelab to a different country, which currently consist of two kubernetes nodes, a NAS and various home automation devices. I will be scaling down gradually, taking cold storage backups of everything and plan to resurrect everything on new hardware once I have moved.

Last year I wanted to set up a budget media PC and got enamored by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCDmHljsinY
I got a 600 G3 with the 4560 processor, installed Debian onto it and hooked it to my 4k TV mainly to run immich and stremio.
Immich runs just fine, though I have gotten too fast behind its upgrades and having less knowledge about Docker, I'm afraid to update immich. Need to figure that out.
But what disappointed me was that my good quality videos (even the downloaded ones) are choppy to run (unlike the fluid expectations from the video above) and I don't really know what I should look into to make it better.
- Hardware Haven is one of my favs, so much inspiration to gain from that channel!
- I'm waiting until immich is stable before I even switch over to it, should be sometime this year
  
  What I'm looking for is a way to take backup of Docker containers so I can restore them in case things go wrong. Doing so with VMs is so easy. If nothing works, I'll make an image of my OS disk. Unless some benevolent self hoster tells me a simple way, which was my hope when posting here :D

I want to make an sbc nas, as I dont need much. But finding the right sbc is hard, hoping the odroid h4+ will do the trick.
- Checkout openmediavault they develop on some sbcs so the forum should be helpful

Building a new, bigger, storage server using TrueNAS scale. I’ve been on CORE forever and it works well. Running out of space, though, and might as well upgrade the OS too.

Get everything migrated across to my new k3s cluster. I’ve been using larger boxes (unraid) and a couple of 1L mini PCs with proxmox to run my homelab until now.. but I work with kubernetes and terraform daily and wanted something declarative.
I’ve now got k3s setup with a handful of services migrated (Immich, Tailscale, Nextcloud etc) but there’s still a ton to go (arr suite, various databases, Plex, Tautulli etc). It’s another job entirely.
I love it but sometimes I wonder why I do this to myself 😅

Finish building a mini-rack with a server (almost done).
Finish cabling the house with CAT6 cables.
Migrate the current VPS running my docker services to the self-hosted server.
Implement a NAS on the server using a virtualized OpenMediaVault instance.
Migrate my network infrastructure from a single asuswrt-merlin router to OPNSense + Cisco Switch.
- What mini rack did you go for? Am looking to do the same.
  
  I built one! I bought some rails, a couple of network trays and some wheels and there you have it!