Life with a Homelab

1st February 2025

At the start of 2025 I finally pulled the trigger on a project I have long since wanted to do, I bought a bunch of components and built myself a homelab.

The fully completed homelab up and running

I had initially been toying with the idea for the past couple of years after finding out about the Jellyfin project. I thought it’d be nice to be able to run my own personal streaming service that I could stock with movies and tv shows that I personally would watch (especially compared to the lackluster and pricey offering of the usual streaming services)

But why limit myself to just a box I can stream movies and tv from? When you own your own hardware, there is no limit to what you can do, enter Proxmox. As far as I am concerned, Proxmox is nothing short of a modern software engineering marvel. An operating system that allows me to easily spin up virtual machines of any flavour that I can remotely manage? Incredible!

The specs

Getting up and running

I started the build on the first weekend in January, I was quite nervous as this was only my second full PC build I had ever done after my first attempt a couple of years earlier ended in disaster. Before that, the most I had ever worked my any of my PCs was when I was a teenager either upgrading my graphics card or adding sick cathode lightning (that should give you an idea of how old I am).

However, despite some creative cable management and what seemed like the stiffest RAM slots in the known universe I had managed to put it all together. My sense of dread was quickly washed away after realising it wasn’t getting a HDMI signal because I hadn’t pushed the connector all the way in and after a few moments I was greeted with the BIOS.

BIOS(-es) have come on a long way since I first started screwing around with computers, they even let you use your mouse these days! A glance through the BIOS revealed everything to be in order, all RAM was recognised as was running at the correct speed and my CPU was running at the correct temperature. However, I was short a few SSDs

When I was planning out the build I decided that I would want a generic machine that I could use as a NAS instead of a NAS a could modify to be a generic server. This lead me to purchase the ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 card.

The ASUS Hyper m.2 x16 Card

ITX motherboards aren’t known for having a large array of M.2 slots and given the particular case I had chosen (I had bought the case over a year before I bought any components) there would be no room inside the case for traditional spinning hard drives. So I opted for a PCIe expansion card that would give me a large amount of storage and take full advantage of the gen 5 PCIe slot (assuming of course that I wasn’t dumb enough to end up buying gen 4 SSDs thus rendering the gen 5 capabilities of the mobo and card redundant 😢)

Anyway, I had inserted the SSDs into the expansion card, plugged it into the mobo, powered on the system only to be met with a single drive detected.

Thankfully I had done my reading on passing through PCIe devices through to ProxMox and had been introduced to the concept of bifurcation the TL:DR version is that you can subdivide the sixteen PCIe lanes into smaller lanes in order to run different devices off the same slot. In this case, instead of passing through the whole card in 16/0 mode, I could run in 4/4/4/4 mode so each individual drive could be recognised and eventually be passed through to a virtual machine.

For some reason, the BIOS in this AsRock motherboard has hidden the option to bifrucate the PCIe slot hidden by default and only by using the search function can it be found. Once I had located and updated this setting then all drives were recognised

Bifurcation working with all drives recognised

Success, now that all my drives were recognised it was a simple case of getting proxmox installed onto the main boot disk and following the excellent guide by craft computing on YouTube to get TrueNas setup with my drives passed through successfully.

Future Works

Rather than ramble on about all the things I have setup within ProxMox such as TrueNAS, Jellyfin and my devbox I will instead end it here and will do some followup posts about a single system or else this post will just go on and on.

Take care!