A homelab on a budget

Everything runs on one used mini PC with 32 GB of RAM and a single NVMe drive. It draws less power than the router next to it.

Containers, not VMs

Proxmox runs five LXC containers: DNS filtering, a Git forge with a CI runner, a password manager and a media server. Containers boot in seconds and share the kernel, which matters when you have one CPU socket and no patience.

Everything in Git

The containers are defined with OpenTofu and configured with Ansible. If the mini PC dies, rebuilding is a new box, one apply and one playbook run, plus restoring data from backups.

What I skipped

No rack, no 10-gigabit switch, no cluster. A single node fails as a whole, and the backups are what make that acceptable.