How One Developer Built a Lean Homelab Server Using Alpine Linux

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A developer documented their process of building a minimal homelab server on a Zimablade machine using Alpine Linux, deliberately avoiding bloated NAS distributions and unsolicited web interfaces. The setup uses MergerFS to pool multiple drives into a single mount point and SnapRAID for parity-based data protection without traditional RAID lock-in. The installation involves configuring Alpine with LVM-based disk partitioning, OpenSSH, and XFS-formatted drives identified via UUID entries in fstab. Additional tools like bash, util-linux, and FUSE are added to replace Alpine defaults and support the storage stack. The author notes this is a personal configuration walkthrough rather than a universal tutorial, and individual setups may vary.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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