A small server in a hallway cupboard
This is the personal homelab of Smirnov. One quiet Debian machine, a few drives, and a lot of small scripts. I write short notes here about self-hosting, Linux, storage and automating the boring parts of keeping a home server alive.
Notes
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A quieter case for the server
The server lives in a cupboard in the hallway, and the old case was loud enough to hear from the bedroom. A new case with larger, slower fans fixed it. Temperatures actually went down.
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Upgrading the server to Debian 13
The server had been on Debian 12 since it was installed. The upgrade to Debian 13 went smoothly after reading the release notes twice. The only surprise was a renamed network interface.
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A small Prometheus and Grafana setup
I wanted to know about full disks before they were full. A basic Prometheus with node_exporter and a couple of Grafana dashboards turned out to be enough. Alerts go to email and are deliberately few.
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Backups with restic, finally
Snapshots are not backups, so the next step after ZFS was a real off-site copy. I settled on restic with a small external drive at home and a second repository at a relative's place. Restores are tested every month now.
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Moving the storage pool to ZFS
The old mdadm mirror had served well for six years, but I wanted snapshots and checksums. Over a long weekend I moved everything to a ZFS mirror on two new drives. The copy itself was boring, which is exactly what you want.
Projects
- Balcony weather station — A small microcontroller with temperature, humidity and pressure sensors in a 3D printed enclosure on the balcony.
- Photo sync script — A Python script that collects photos from the family phones, removes duplicates by content hash, sorts them into folders by date and copies them to the photo dataset.
- Server status page — A tiny static status page generated every five minutes from Prometheus data.