I’m already hosting pihole, but i know there’s so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!
Edit: Thanks all! I’ve got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!
Old PC that can be on all the time.
If you dont have one and want dedicated hardware, I would recommend a used server, or something you can whitebox (like using as asrock rack mobo that takes a desktop ryzen but supports ecc memory)
Put proxmox on as the host OS, two ssd’s in raid 1 is good for a boot drive / VM storage drive. Raid 10 if you want real high performance, but probably unneeded.
Look for a case that has a SAS backplane, and then connect the backplane to a HBA card. Pass this card through to freenas for storage shares and stuff.
I recommend not virtualizing your router. So, if you want togoet away from Soho gear, either flash a Soho router with openWRT, or build a separate box for pfsense or opnsense. If you go that route, you will need a separate switch / access point. Unifi gear has a good balance of features and affordability, and can all be managed from a single ui (let’s say you have 3 switches and 2 access points… You dont need to go to 5 web UI’s, its all in one spot - and you can self host the web ui in proxmox)