An in-depth look into the current state of my homelab in 2025, including services running, how I expose everything, what hardware I’m using, linux distros, backups, reliability, redundancy and much more.

My network architecture for exposing linux vms running on my homelab to provide them as vps servers for friends and giving them their own public ip address.

Various methods for exposing self hosted applications to the internet securely when you have things like cgnat, your isp blocking ports or anything that prevents you from port forwarding.

Recently I picked up a $100 Lenovo ThinkCentre M710Q off ebay with an i5 7400T, 8GB of ram and a 256GB NVMe SSD to add to my Proxmox cluster.

The good & Bad

Mini PCs are built to be small, quiet and power efficient, perfect for a home server. They’re also tiny, hence the name meaning they can live pretty much anywhere.

However, their form factor makes them hard to upgrade for future expandability and hard to add redundant storage to.

This post is made for debian based linux distros.

Don’t expose ssh, use a VPN

This is obviously not viable for stuff running in the cloud but for a homelab server its advised to not expose ssh or management ports, if you need external access use a free VPN service like Tailscale or self-hosted Wireguard.

Non-root account for logins / Disable root login

Disabling the ability to login as root helps with many automated bots that brute-force ssh into your server, start by making a new user with any username you want