Building a functional homelab often starts with a lot of excitement, but it quickly turns into a balancing act of managing hardware and fighting network clutter. You buy a couple of machines, get a VPS, start hosting services, and suddenly find yourself buried in individual browser extensions. What you should do is consider adding the below to get your homelab to do what you want.

Pi-hole for network control

You won’t need to install extensions on every device

Every homelab needs a great way to manage network traffic, and Pi-hole is one of the best tools for the job. It works as a network-wide ad blocker and local DNS server, so instead of installing ad-blocking extensions on every laptop, phone, and tablet in your house, you just set your router’s DNS settings to the static IP address of the Pi-hole, and you’re done.

From there, it checks every outbound request against lists of known ad and tracking servers. When a device tries to load something from an ad network, Pi-hole drops the request before it ever reaches your devices. It’s one of those things you should know before using it.

You want this because online ads are notorious for slowing down page loads, eating up bandwidth, draining batteries with autoplaying video, and occasionally sneaking in malicious code. It also goes beyond web browsing since smart TVs, mobile apps, and IoT devices are constantly phoning home with tracking data, and Pi-hole intercepts that too.

How well it works depends heavily on which blocklists you use. You can use the Steven Black unified host list or HaGeZi’s multi-lists for really good coverage. However, don’t just pile on every list you can find. Too many blocklists lead to false positives that break legitimate sites. When that happens, Pi-hole can give you the logs so you can track down the offending domain and whitelist it.

You can also pair Pi-hole with Unbound, which is a local recursive DNS resolver. The first time you visit a new domain, the lookup takes a moment while Unbound works through the DNS hierarchy. After that, results are cached locally and resolved pretty much right then.

The most important part is that when you run your own resolver, you won’t have an upstream provider like Google or Cloudflare logging everything you look up.

Proxmox VE for virtualization

Stop dedicating an entire computer to a single task

Credit: Proxmox

Proxmox Virtual Environment is the foundation of any serious home server setup. It’s an open-source, enterprise-grade virtualization platform that runs as a bare-metal, type-1 hypervisor. This just means it sits directly on your hardware instead of inside another operating system.

So it can distribute resources and keep management interfaces cleanly separated from your running workloads pretty easily. Instead of dedicating an entire physical machine to one job, Proxmox lets you run multiple independent environments on the same hardware simultaneously.

What makes Proxmox useful is its support for two distinct virtualization approaches. When you need complete hardware isolation, or you’re running a non-Linux operating system, you can spin up full Kernel-based VMs. These are great at emulating the underlying hardware and run their own independent kernels. That comes with the highest level of security and isolation, but you get a dedicated CPU and memory resources.

Proxmox also comes with some virtualization overhead, though it is small enough that it rarely impacts performance.

For internal services that don’t need an isolated kernel, Proxmox has Linux Containers (LXC). Instead of just emulating an entire hardware stack, containers share the host’s Linux kernel directly, which gets them close to bare-metal performance with almost no overhead.

What’s pretty cool is security. Unprivileged LXC containers stop compromised services from ever gaining root access to the physical host because of the way the software maps user IDs. For workloads that need direct hardware access, like a TrueNAS storage server, Proxmox also supports PCI(e) passthrough.

TrueNAS Core for storage

An open source way to keep your files safe

Credit: TrueNAS

TrueNAS Core feels like the go-to storage operating system for homelabs because it’s a trustworthy platform built around managing files and serving them over your network. Hardware RAID controllers hide your drives from the operating system, but TrueNAS Core hands that job to the OpenZFS file system.

This means the file system talks directly to your physical disks, giving it full control over how data is stored, checked, and shared across your network. ZFS protects your files by generating and continuously verifying checksums for every block of data written to your storage pool.

Every time a file is read, ZFS recalculates that checksum and compares it against the stored value to catch silent corruption. Since ZFS handles redundancy directly at the file system level, it can automatically repair corrupted blocks using the redundant data on your other drives. A properly configured pool can survive multiple simultaneous drive failures without losing a single byte.

TrueNAS Core keeps things fast through a memory-heavy caching system. Your system RAM acts as the primary Adaptive Replacement Cache, so your most frequently accessed files are served straight from memory. This is why TrueNAS Core needs at least 8 GB of RAM just to run, and why performance climbs noticeably when you give it 16, 32 GB or more for heavier workloads like iSCSI or directory services.

This isn’t for everyone

Running these platforms isn’t always easy, and it’s important to be realistic about the learning curve. You’ll need to dedicate some serious system memory to keep your storage safe, and you’ll still need browser-level blockers to catch the advertisements that slip through a network-level filter. If you want a quick plug-and-play setup without any maintenance, this route might feel like overkill. But if you want to stop wasting hardware potential and actually own your data infrastructure, combining these tools is the cleanest way to do it.

9/10

Brand

UGREEN

CPU

Intel Core Ultra 7 255H

The Ugreen iDX 6011 Pro AI NAS is one of the most powerful NAS servers in the Ugreen lineup. With Intel’s Core Ultra 7 255H 16-core processor and 64GB of LPDDR5/x RAM onboard, there’s more than enough power to handle anything you can throw at this system. Add to that dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, dual 10GbE LAN ports, an OCuLink expansion port, and more, and you have a very solid network attached storage system.