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Rebuilding my homelab, again

07-24-2025

I do a lot of homelabbing, and while its mainly just messing around and Vaultwarden to store my passords, I love trying to make it more efficient. Recently I was gifted an old 2tb HDD, bringing my total storage in my lab up to over 5TB, and I realized that maybe I need to set up a drive pool, instead of just mounting them all seperate. I was using OpenMediaVault, but OMV lacks XFS drive pool support (at least that I could find) so I figured it was time for another rebuild.

Step 1 was, as usual, choosing the OS. I went with Rasberry Pi OS Lite, as I'm using a Pi 5, and its Debian based, so I'm used to it. I imaged that up with the preconfigured settings of my choice ("CopperThree" for a hostname, SSH enabled, WLAN off).

From there I got started setting up the LVM with my drives, which was (semi) easy. I have 1x3TB, 1x2TB, and 2x256GB HDDs, but for some reason all of them woundn't go in to one LVM pool beacuse of blocksizes, so I decided to use the 3TB as main, and pool the reamining for backups.

The commands I used for this were sudo pvcreate /dev/sdX (formatting the drives for LVM), sudo vgcreate [pool name] /dev/sdX (making a new pool), and sudo lvresize -l +100%FREE (to extend the LVM)

After I sorted storage I was thinking I might try some sort of unified auth setup, which sounded good so I looked around and found Authentik, which seemed great, and after much struggle I got it to work, but once it was working I realized the hassle it would be to try to integrate everything with it and decided that I'll just use the same username and password for all my services, since they're all behind Wireguard anyway. The only service I leave exposed is Vaultwarden over a Cloudflare tunnel, and thats password protected (for obvious reasons).

The main services I used on my last lab were:

and all of these services were serving me quite well, so I was able to just steal their docker-composes from my last lab. I ended up swaping AdGuardHome for a different DNS server called Technitium DNS, which is more of a full fledged server, which so far has worked well for me, as well as I think being a bit lighter.

Of the new services so far I have OliveTin - which is a little command runner, SearXNG - a selfhosted search engine, and Paperless-ngx - a document manager. I'm unsure how long these will last before they either become useless, or become permanent.