Homelab Update 2026

Its been awhile since I have covered when I am in my homelab evolution, so I thought for the beginning of 2026 I would update everyone on progress so far.

Networking

This will be the year I move to a full Unifi stack. I have swapped my router to a Unifi Gateway Lite I got on sale on black friday for $49. I love it. However, that is as far as I have gotten. My FiOS router is still here being used for wifi only. Also both my 10gig switch (Netgear Prosafe XS708E) and my 48 port gigabit switch (Netgear Prosafe GS748T) have not been upgraded yet.

I plan to upgrade the 10gig switch to a Unifi Flex 10 GbE and the 48 port gigabit to a Unifi Lite 8 PoE, which if I bought at full price would be about $400. I also need to add an AP (Unifi U7 Lite $99) to replace the FiOS router. So I am taking my time working through all of that since I don't have $500 right now.

Proxmox

I needed to upgrade this machine badly and it finally happened! The old Proxmox was running off of a Dell Optiplex with a 4th gen Intel CPU and DDR3. I have become more and more dependent on it of late, and it needed to be a proper build, not just something I rescued out of the garbage.

I got a cheap 2U chassis for about $60 off of Amazon and put some spare parts I had lying around in it. Right now its running an Intel i3 10-105, 32gb DDR4 on an MSI B560M PRO WIFI mATX motherboard with a 500gb SSD. The network card (or NIC) is an Intel X540 dual port 10G-BASE-T adapter. This thing runs like a champ now!

TrueNAS

Not a lot has happened on this front, and since this is a production server don't expect large leaps but small increments.

The apps pool is now a mirror of brand new 1tb SSDs. I am running the latest version of TrueNAS (Goldeye 25.10.1 at the time of this writing) which means my old nVidia P400 was deprecated in the latest driver update. As such, I now procured from eBay a slightly used GTX 1650 for transcode. Other than that - nothing to report.

Other Changes

There is nothing else of note really. Since most of the resources are on my TrueNAS server, its running my almost 80 docker containers with no issues at all. My Proxmox server is doing its job by letting me clone prebuilt LXC templates so I can burn tokens with Claude Code building fun things for my homelab (read all about it). I am really excited about network updates when I finally get there, but between now and then I'm biding my time waiting for good sales...