Self-hosting and Homelabs

Technology
1

My wife and I have decided to go HARD on moving off of cloud services and start self hosting whatever we can. Because I’m the more technically skilled between us, I’ve been testing out a lot of server OSs, selfhosted solutions, etc and it’s actually been pretty fun.

Here’s my current hardware:

  • Heimdall: A mini PC running Ubuntu Server with Pi-Hole in a docker container for network-wide ad blocking and DNS. Might switch it out for a Raspberry Pi if I can’t figure out something else for it to do as well.

  • Nebula Station: A Cisco C220 M3 server I picked up for $70 with 32 cores, 128GB of ram, and 8 drive bays that I’ve been slowly filling. It runs on Unraid.
    It’s main job is as the storage server, but it also runs any Docker containers that need fast access to the storage and any VMs that don’t need a GPU.

  • Athena: Ryzen 7 2700X, 32GB ram, GTX 1070, Also running Unraid. It handles anything that needs more computational grunt than Nebula Station can give, especially GPU loads, and docker containers that don’t need to interface with the storage shares.

What Services I’m Using:

  • Pi-Hole: Whole network Ad, analytics, and tracking blocking, as well as local DNS.

  • Jellyfin: Tv shows and Movies. Planning on buying a Bluray drive so I can start ripping our library.

  • Kavita: Ebooks, TTRPG manuals, Comics

  • Navidrome: Music. This is less settled as I need to find a good mobile client for it.

  • Immich: Basically a Google Photos clone that’s under active development. I WAS using Photostructure, which I really liked, but my wife really wanted facial recognition and Immich has that. It also has a good mobile app with auto phone backup while Photostructure is web only.

  • Twingate: This is how we access our services from outside the home network. Faster than traditional VPN with per user access control to resources and doesn’t require opening ports on the router.

  • Docker-Wyze-Bridge: creates alternative streams from my Wyze cameras that other apps can use. I’ll be running an NVR in docker soon so that’ll be handy for that, but for now it’s just providing a video of one of my 3d printers to Repetier Host.

  • NextCloud: been fiddling with it to see if it can work as a dropbox/onedrive replacement, but, ehhhh… doesn’t seem to be what I need. It’s a cool system, but it really seems better if you don’t already have a ton of existing data.

What are you folks running at home, if anything?

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