Self-hosting journey - #1

The middle of the RAM rampage seemed like a perfect moment to get into homelabbing. So, inspired by the TinyMiniMicro project I began my search of willhaben and facebook marketplace.

I found this little machine - ThinkCentre M920q Tiny refurbished, with 12 month warranty, for around 140€.

• CPU: Intel Core i5-8500T (6 Cores)
• RAM: 16 GB DDR4. It’s a single stick, so I have a free slot to upgrade later.
• Storage: 256 GB NVMe SSD + 500 GB HDD for data.

Motivation

My main motivation behind this project is to learn move about linux, networking, and virtualization. But I also wanted to make it practical, therefore I defined what services I want to run.:

• A Linux VM to play around with and experiment.
• Production apps, like Actual Budget.
• My own development projects and apps.
• A GitHub Runner.
• And more in the future.

Requirements:

• Securely connect to the local network from the outside world.
• Access services with friendly URLs like budget.lan.

Plan

I decided to use Proxmox VE as a virtualization platform.

To fulfill my requirements I decided on the following structure. Apart from the Proxmox VE Host OS I’ve split my system into four parts:

1. LXC: infra-services

For critical network tools like Tailscale (VPN), and more in the future. Kept lightweight.

2. VM: sandbox-ubuntu

A Linux VM to play with.

VM docker-core

A stable Docker VM for services running 24/7 (like the budget app).

VM: github-runner

My build server for running GitHub CI/CD tasks locally.

Execution

I followed Proxmox docs and Tailscale’s youtube videos on how to install and configure Proxmox VE.

Then I created my sandbox VM, which I called jaskier.

SSH

To easily access my services, i added 2 hosts to my ~/.ssh/config named pve and jaskier.

Host pve
    HostName [IP_ADDRESS]
    User root

Host jaskier
    HostName [IP_ADDRESS]
    User [USER]

I then ran the following commands to copy my id_ed25519.pub key to both systems, allowing me to SSH without typing in a password:

ssh-copy-id pve
ssh-copy-id jaskier

Future work

I called it a day, and will continue in the upcoming days.