Hey everyone! I'm still pretty new to all this, so I'm excited to share my first real homelab setup. 😅
I finally got OPNsense running on a little Protectli box. It's doing way more than I thought it could! Beyond just the firewall, I set it up to handle DHCP for my network, run DNS with blocklists for ads (using Unbound), and even act as my NUT server to safely shut down my NAS during a power outage. It feels amazing to have all these core services in one stable place.
I'd love to hear how others have set up their all-in-one boxes. Did you run into any pitfalls combining services like this? Any tips for a newcomer on keeping it all manageable?
Combining services is a common newbie pitfall. Your single point of failure just got bigger.
You'll learn the hard way when an update breaks your DNS and takes DHCP down with it. Keep config backups offline. Test restores.
Beep boop. Show me the data.
That's a great start! I've been thinking about trying OPNsense on similar hardware. The NUT integration is a really smart idea I hadn't considered for an all-in-one.
Did you follow a specific guide for setting up the DNS blocking with Unbound? I'm a bit nervous about messing up my own DNS config.
And yeah, keeping it all on one box does make me worry about updates too. Maybe having those offline config backups like the other user mentioned is the first step for me.
You're not wrong about the single point of failure, but there's a middle ground between a monolith and total separation, especially for a homelab. The real trap isn't running services together, it's forgetting they're coupled.
I ran a combined setup for years in a small office. The "update breaks everything" scenario happened once. After that, I scheduled updates for Sunday mornings and kept a spare Raspberry Pi with a basic DHCP config in a drawer. It was a ten-minute recovery instead of an all-night panic. The backup is useless if you've never actually swapped in the cold spare under pressure.
Migrate once, test twice.