My homelab as of 2026 - hardware & networking

I’ve been running a small homelab for over 15 years now, starting with an entry-level Synology DS210j NAS and then experimenting with different equipment over the time. After many many iterations I arrived at my current configuration that almost fully satisfies my needs.

Hardware

NAS

The primary objective of my self hosting is to store ever-increasing amount of data that I wish not to share with third parties - both due to privacy concerns and cost. Current iteration of my NAS is a SuperMicro SuperServer 5029C-T equipped with a i3-9100 and 32 GB of DDR4 ECC memory. I chose it due to the following:

• it is a complete system (you only need to buy a CPU and RAM), including a PSU,
• it has a compact case (240mm H x 210mm W x 279mm D),
• it has a four hot-swappable 3.5" disk bays plus 2.5" fixed bays and a M2 slot,
• last but not least - it has IPMI, which is the killer feature that I was looking for.

I put four Seagate Ironwolfs (2x 4TB and 2x 6TB), two Crucial SATA SSDs and created two ZFS pools (rust and flash). The NAS is running latest Debian stable and is only exposing file-related services - NFS, SMB, Syncthing and Proxmox Backup Server.

I’m really fond of this build, it’s been rock solid for nearly two years now. IPMI makes it super easy to maintain remotely in case of networking or boot issues.

Compute

The services that I’m self hosting are running on a Proxmox VE cluster consisting of three nodes. These are USFF (ultra small form factor) PCs, which I bought used to save money. At this moment I have two Dells and one Lenovo specced as follows:

In addition to this I also have one Raspberry Pi 3B+ which sole purpose is running mqtt2sms-broker . This software requires a GSM modem being plugged in and while it is possible to do USB passthrough in Proxmox, the modem got stuck every couple of weeks and only plugging it out and in again helped. Since I migrated this from Proxmox to RPi it has been working without a hitch for a couple of months now, so I’m leaving it as is.

Networking

My home network is split into purpose-specific VLANs - management, guest, IoT, IP cam and others. Each network is isolated from the others and cross-network traffic is possible only by explicit firewall rules, for example guest network can access WAN and local DNS servers only.

I’m a big fan of Mikrotik devices - their hardware is top notch and the configuration possibilities are limitless - perfect for tinkering. My main gateway is a RB5009 , another RB5009 (which used to be a backup) is a main homelab switch and a hEX PoE (also as a switch) in my office. The RB5009 is extremely powerful (probably too much for my needs) though it runs hot even on small load since basically its whole body is a radiator.

In my network there are also TP-Link devices - an EAP245 and an EAP683 UR as wireless access points and a SG2210P for linking (and powering) my IP cameras. They are managed with a (self hosted, obviously) Omada controller - such centralised management is the only thing that I’m missing in Mikrotiks.

I’ve always wanted to run IPv6 - I bug my ISP every couple of months but they always reply with “we currently don’t have plans to deploy IPv6”. A few months ago I decided to give Hurricane Electric’s Tunnel Broker a try - I applied for /48 prefix to neatly subnet it and studied the ins and outs of IPv6 configuration on my Mikrotik. I set everything up and enabled IPv6 on my vm subnet - all worked great, however keeping two firewall configuration rulesets (one for v4 and another for v6) was cumbersome and a bit stressful knowing that there’s no more NAT to shield me from my mistakes. Being satisfied with throughput and latency of HE tunnel I enabled v6 on my main subnet. In the beginning, all seemed fine - I was aware of issues with streaming services (they consider such tunneling as a way of circumventing regional blocks) and simple blacklisting of AAAA responses for Netflix and Disney+ domains fixed that. What I did not expect was the stream of endless captchas, popping up everywhere. I checked the boxes, selected the buses, the bikes, the pedestrians crossings but they refused to let me through - and this went away the moment I disabled v6. The cherry on top was that some sites plainly returned 403 when using HE tunnel, without any indication what is the problem. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back - I disabled IPv6 on my main subnet as it was unbearable to use.

For remotely accessing my home network I use Wireguard - it’s lightweight, easy to configure and what’s the most important - it is directly supported by Mikrotik that’s acting as my gateway. Previously I was using OpenVPN that was installed on my NAS, but whenever NAS was down for whatever reason, I was unable to connect at all. Having VPN service running directly on the router is a real godsend.