the homelab

updated 11 november 2026 · one machine, at my family's home, two thousand kilometres from where i study.

this is the inventory, not a sketch. it's the box that runs d's labs and about thirty other guests. the build story, with a video, is here.

status

live status isn't wired up to this page yet. when it is, this line will say when the server last spoke. until then, the incidents below are the honest record.

the machine

cpu

intel core i9-14900k, 8 performance and 16 efficiency cores. its built-in graphics mean no graphics card.

board

gigabyte b760m ds3h, micro-atx. its power stage is the weak point, not the cpu.

memory

32 gb ddr4-3200, two sticks.

system disk

1 tb wd_black sn7100 nvme.

data disk

2 tb wd red plus, a cmr nas drive.

cooling

a 360 mm msi aio, plus a spare case fan zip-tied over the power stage. that fan took it from 85 to 67 degrees at full load.

power

corsair rm850e. the cpu is capped at 90 watts sustained and 125 watts burst, because the board's power stage hit 105 degrees in 55 seconds at 180 watts.

case

msi mag forge 120a.

network

2.5 gbe to a home fibre line whose public address changes whenever it likes, and whose isp blocks inbound web ports.

ups

none for the server, so every power cut is a hard power-off. the fibre router has a small battery of its own.

how traffic reaches it

  internet
     │
  cloudflare      tunnels go out from the house, so no
     │            inbound port is needed. a login sits
     │            in front of anything sensitive.
  ┌──┴──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │ proxmox ve        the host                      │
  ├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
  │ containers        photos, files, passwords,     │
  │                   documents, git, rss, apis,    │
  │                   monitoring, backups           │
  │ virtual machines  d's labs front door (always)  │
  │                   d's labs lab host (only while │
  │                     someone has a lab running)  │
  │                   immich                        │
  └──┬──────────────────────────────────────────────┘
     │
  2 tb disk         nightly backups, plus a second
                    restic copy of photos and files

  admin: tailscale first, two independent fallbacks.

what runs on it

d's labs

the lab platform. student containers run on their own virtual machine that the front door powers on and off.

public apis

api.dharun.dev, free apis for indian developers. it deploys itself from github releases and rolls back on its own if a release fails its health check.

personal

photos, files, passwords, a document archive with tamil and hindi ocr, a private git server, rss, automations and a code editor in the browser. the full list is on uses.

monitoring

prometheus, grafana, loki and uptime kuma inside, and a small check from outside that pushes exactly two alerts on a power cut: down, and back.

the rules it runs by

• every change must be safe to make from two thousand kilometres away.
• there are always two independent ways in, and i never change both in one session.
• risky network changes run behind a ten-minute dead-man switch that undoes itself.
• a power cut is a normal event: the bios powers on when mains returns, every disk is ext4 with safe caching, every database has fsync on.
• a backup only counts once a restore has worked.

incidents

every outage and what caused it, newest first. short and honest.