Compact gear and practical choices.
Two Proxmox nodes, a Docker stack carrying most of the day-to-day services, and a NAS holding the media. Small on purpose — built to be useful and easy to maintain rather than to fill a rack.
What this setup is built around
The lab centres on a compact main node running Proxmox, with a single Docker host carrying most of the services. A second node sits alongside it for spare capacity. Storage lives on a separate NAS so the compute boxes stay disposable — if a node dies, nothing irreplaceable dies with it.
DNS for the whole network resolves through Pi-hole, and remote access runs over Tailscale and Twingate rather than anything being exposed directly to the internet.
- Main nodeMinisforum UM750L Slim
- Second nodeProxmox VE
- StorageUGREEN DH2300
- NetworkUniFi Cloud Gateway
- DNSPi-hole
- Remote accessTailscale + Twingate
Three ways in
The detail is split across a few pages rather than stacked into one long scroll.
Nodes, NAS, switch, and the desktop beside them — with specs and why each was picked.
The service stackTwenty-four services across management, monitoring, media, productivity, and data. Filterable.
The networkAn interactive map of how it fits together, from the gateway down to the container host.