What Runs in My Homelab, and Why Each Box Is There
My homelab is not a rack of enterprise gear. It’s a handful of old machines on a shelf and a desk, most of them more than ten years old, each with one clear job. Here’s the whole thing, box by box.
It started with Home Assistant. I wanted one place to watch what my home was doing, especially the solar panels and the heat pump water heater. But before connecting everything in the house to a new system, I decided to build the foundation first: solid networking, security and backups.
So the first thing I ran wasn’t Home Assistant at all. It was Pi-hole, for network-wide ad blocking and DNS. Then I wanted Pi-hole to keep working even when a machine was down, which meant a second copy on a second box, and a proper server to run things on. That’s how Proxmox arrived, and the lab grew from there.
The main server: an HP Omen desktop running Proxmox
The center of the lab is an HP Omen 870 desktop with an Intel Core i7-7700 (4 cores, 8 threads) and 16 GB of DDR4. It runs Proxmox VE, which splits it into several small virtual machines and containers:
- Pi-hole for network-wide ad blocking and local DNS
- Home Assistant for home automation
- A Docker container for monitoring: uptime checks, logs and host metrics
- A reverse proxy so each service gets a proper name and HTTPS certificate
- Proxmox Backup Server, which backs up all of the above every night
Storage is a 240 GB Intel data-center SSD for the system, plus two 1 TB hard drives in a RAID-1 mirror for backups. The Omen only has three SATA ports, so I added a 4-port PCIe SATA card for more drives. That card gets its own post.
Why an Omen? It was my gaming PC. Once it was retired from gaming, a 4-core, 8-thread desktop with room for drives was more than enough to run a handful of small services, and it cost me nothing. An old gaming or office desktop is one of the best free starting points for a homelab.
The backup DNS and UPS monitor: an Acer J1900 mini PC
An Acer Aspire with an Intel Celeron J1900, a low-power chip from 2013–2014, runs a second copy of Pi-hole. If the main server is down for an update, DNS fails over to the J1900 automatically, so the internet keeps working for everyone in the house.
It also has the UPS plugged into it by USB, and shares the battery status over the network so the main server knows when to shut down.
The J1900 is the box I’d replace first; a post on what I’m looking at is coming.
The AI admin box: a 2015 MacBook Pro
A mid-2015 15" MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM runs Ubuntu and stays on 24/7 with the lid open. It’s where Claude Code, an AI coding assistant, does its homelab work: checking the servers each morning, applying updates and keeping my documentation current. More in its own post.
Networking: UniFi Cloud Gateway Max and a U6 Pro access point
A UniFi Cloud Gateway Max is the router and firewall, and a UniFi U6 Pro access point, powered by a PoE injector, handles Wi-Fi. The servers share a simple unmanaged switch in the office.
I chose UniFi mainly on the strength of Reddit reviews: in homelab and networking threads it’s one of the most common recommendations for a home network that can grow.
Power: a 2011 APC Smart-UPS with new batteries
Everything important sits on an APC Smart-UPS SMT1000 built in 2011. I bought it used with no batteries, added two new ones in May 2026, and it now reports over 100 minutes of runtime at my load. A full post on how I did it is coming.
Off-site-ish backups: a USB drive in a drawer
Once a month, the nightly backups are copied to an encrypted 3 TB USB drive that is otherwise unplugged. If ransomware or a failed upgrade takes out the server, there’s a copy that was never connected.
What I’d change
Three upgrades are at the top of my list:
- Replace the J1900 with a modern low-power mini PC. It still works, but the chip is from 2013–2014, and newer boxes are faster, idle at a few watts and have much better networking.
- Double the Omen’s RAM from 16 GB to 32 GB, the most its two memory slots can hold. More memory means more room for virtual machines and containers.
- Retire the oldest backup drive. One of the two hard drives in the RAID mirror has run for more than 64,000 hours, over seven years of power-on time. Its replacement is already installed and waiting to be swapped in.
Each of these will get its own post when I do it.