[HN Gopher] My Homelab Setup
___________________________________________________________________
My Homelab Setup
Author : photon_collider
Score : 97 points
Date : 2026-03-08 16:46 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bryananthonio.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bryananthonio.com)
| kleebeesh wrote:
| Neat!
|
| > Right now, accessing my apps requires typing in the IP address
| of my machine (or Tailscale address) together with the app's port
| number.
|
| You might try running Nginx as an application, and configure it
| as a reverse proxy to the other apps. In your router config you
| can setup foo.home and bar.home to point to the Nginx IP address.
| And then the Nginx config tells it to redirect foo.home to
| IP:8080 and bar.home to IP:9090. That's not a thorough
| explanation but I'm sure you can plug this into an LLM and it'll
| spell it out for you.
| verdverm wrote:
| Caddy is increasingly popular these days too. I use both and
| cannot decide which I prefer.
| victorio wrote:
| Caddy's configuration is so simple and straightforward, I
| love it. For sure a more comfortable experience for simple
| setups
| verdverm wrote:
| The pain I've had with it is distributed configuration,
| i.e. multiple projects that want to config rules. I've been
| using the JSON API rather than their DSL.
|
| Do you know how I might approach this better?
| hk1337 wrote:
| I like Caddy's integration with Cloudflare for handling SSL
| and when I originally saw the idea it was promoted as an
| easy way to have SSL for a homely but I don't use real
| domains for my internal apps and that is required with
| Cloudflare.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| caddy has tailscale integration i think too, so your
| foo.bar.ts.net "just works"
| windexh8er wrote:
| I think most homelabbers default to Caddy and/or Traefik
| these days. Nginx is still around with projects like NPM (the
| _other_ NPM), but Caddy and Traefik are far more capable.
|
| DevOpsToolbox did a great video on many of the reasons why
| Caddy is so great (including performance) [0]. I think the
| only downside with Caddy right now is still how plugins work.
| Beyond that, however it's either Caddy or Traefik depending
| on my use case. Traefik is so easy to plug in and forget
| about and Caddy just has a ton of flexibility and ease of
| setup for quick solutions.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Inu5VhrO1rE
| verdverm wrote:
| _far_ more capable is an exaggeration
|
| I use both, they are by and large substitutable. Nginx has
| a much larger knowledge base and ecosystem, the main reason
| I stick with it.
| philsnow wrote:
| I agree with you that they're more or less equal. I don't
| like the idea of my reverse proxy dealing with
| letsencrypt for me, personally, but that's just a
| preference.
|
| One tricky thing about nginx though, from the "If is
| evil" nginx wiki [0]:
|
| > The if directive is part of the rewrite module which
| evaluates instructions imperatively. On the other hand,
| NGINX configuration in general is declarative. At some
| point due to user demand, an attempt was made to enable
| some non-rewrite directives inside if, and this led to
| the situation we have now.
|
| I use nginx for homelab things because my use-cases are
| simple, but I've run into issues at work with nginx in
| the past because of the above.
|
| [0] https://nginx-wiki.getpagespeed.com/config/if-is-evil
| dwedge wrote:
| I'm not sure why Apache is so unpopular, it can also
| function as a reverse proxy and doesn't have the weird
| configuration issues nginx has.
|
| Some people take this way too far, for instance I've send
| places compiling (end of life) modsec support into nginx
| instead of using the webserver it was built for
| Frotag wrote:
| IME androids dont respect static routes published by the
| router. I guess self hosting DNS might be more robust but I
| usually just settle for bookmarking the ip:port
| frumiousirc wrote:
| This (reverse proxy) is essentially what "tailscale serve"
| does.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| Also recommending using a DNS server that points `*.yourdomain`
| do your reverse proxy's IP. That way requests skip going
| outside your network and helps for ISPs that don't work with
| "loopback" DNS (quotes because I don't know the proper term)
|
| You can then set your DNS in Tailscale to that machines tailnet
| IP and access your servers when away without having to open any
| ports.
|
| And bonus, if it's pihole for dns you now get network-level
| Adblock both in and outside the home.
| mnahkies wrote:
| Personally I'm using haproxy for this purpose, with Lego to
| generate wildcard SSL certs using DNS validation on a public
| domain, then running coredns configured in the tailnet DNS
| resolvers to serve A records for internal names on a subdomain
| of the public one.
|
| I've found this to work quite well, and the SSL whilst somewhat
| meaningless from a security pov since the traffic was already
| encrypted by wire guard, makes the web browser happy so still
| worthwhile.
| anon7000 wrote:
| Or just use Tailscale serve to put the app on a subdomain
| pajamasam wrote:
| This worked for me to get subdomains and TLS certificates
| working on a similar setup: https://blog.mni.li/posts/internal-
| tls-with-caddy/
| ls612 wrote:
| The part you are leaving out is that you also need to set up
| something like a pihole (which you can just run in a container
| on the homelab rather than on a pi) to do the local DNS
| resolution.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Why are you using restic, when TrueNAS offers native solutions to
| backup your data elsewhere?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| exactly because it isn't trueNAS specific I'd imagine
| sgt wrote:
| This is extremely light - not a bad setup, but I mean.. it's like
| 1% of typical Homelabs.
| switchbak wrote:
| It feels like day 2 after you've received the new hard drives.
| It's nice, modern enough but still a pretty bog standard home
| machine, not really "homelab" territory yet.
| sgt wrote:
| Exactly. And I don't mind this being on the HN front page,
| but I'd like to see some proper Homelab setups here. Maybe
| someone can post the coolest setup they've seen so far?
| akerl_ wrote:
| Why do we need to gatekeep "homelab"?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Terms making defined sense aid in conversation.
|
| Why do you need to dilute the term? There is nothing wrong
| with your NAS running 3 apps that you press update once a
| year not being called "homelab" but just "a NAS"
| anon7000 wrote:
| I think if you're playing around with apps & Tailscale on
| your NAS, it's a homelab.
| akerl_ wrote:
| > Why do you need to dilute the term?
|
| Nobody is diluting anything. This person posted the setup
| they have in their home. It's their homelab.
|
| It's not diluting any terms for them to call it that.
| Their setup is just as much a homelab as somebody else's
| 48U rack.
|
| It's just a dick move, and against the rules of the site,
| to see somebody's earnest post about their tech setup and
| post a shallow dismissal about how their setup isn't
| deserving of your imagined barrier to entry.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| They are not researching anything. They just want to have
| few things running.
|
| The whole idea of homelab (regardless of size) is
| learning first.
|
| He just have home server. It's okay to call it that
| akerl_ wrote:
| Oh. Now the imaginary gate is "research"?
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Of typical homelabs that are posted and discussed.
|
| The online activity of the homelab community leans towards
| those who treat it as an enjoyable hobby as opposed to a
| pragmatic solution.
|
| I'm on the other side of the spectrum. Devops is (at best) a
| neutral activity; I personally do it because I strongly dislike
| companies being able to do a rug-pull. I don't think you'll see
| setups like mine too often, as there isn't anything to brag
| about or to show off.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| > This is extremely light
|
| I'm curious about its power consumption on idle, average use,
| and peak.
| skyberrys wrote:
| I too was wondering what made this a homelab. I appreciate the
| setup, but from the word lab I was expecting at least an
| oscilloscope. That being said it has cool features I hadn't
| known about like the image storing system and at home LLM
| support.
| tclancy wrote:
| Deeply suspect it has to do with being in the authors home.
| tclancy wrote:
| Mother of God, why make this comment? It's the poster's setup
| and they are happy with it. What possible value could
| denigrating it do? The ol' ball coach breakin' em down to build
| em up shtick is gone and I don't miss it.
| sgt wrote:
| Didn't mean it that way - and for that I apologize. I was
| just expecting a lot more since it was on the front page.
| tclancy wrote:
| No worries Sarge and thanks for keeping the kids alive out
| there.
| sgt wrote:
| It's a pleasure, Tom! May I call you Tom?
| tclancy wrote:
| Can't hurt.
| linsomniac wrote:
| >Because all of my services share the same IP address, my
| password manager has trouble distinguishing which login to use
| for each one.
|
| In Bitwarden they allow you to configure the matching algorithm,
| and switching from the default to "starts with" is what I do when
| I find that it is matching the wrong entries. So for this case
| just make sure that the URL for the service includes the port
| number and switch all items that are matching to "starts with".
| Though it does pop up a big scary "you probably didn't mean to do
| this" warning when you switch to "starts with"; would be nice to
| be able to turn that off.
| dewey wrote:
| This is always annoying me with 1Password, before that I just
| always added subdomains but now I'm usually hosting everything
| behind Tailscale which makes this problem even worse as the
| differentiation is only the port.
| wrxd wrote:
| You can still have subdomains with Tailscale. Point them at
| the tailscale IP address and run a reverse proxy in front of
| your services
| dewey wrote:
| Good point, but for simplicity i'd still like 1Password to
| use the full hostname + port a the primary key and not the
| hostname.
| domh wrote:
| You can use tailscale services to do this now:
|
| https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-services
|
| Then you can access stuff on your tailnet by going to
| http://service instead of http://ip:port
|
| It works well! Only thing missing now is TLS
| avtar wrote:
| This would be perfect with TLS. The docs don't make this
| clear...
|
| > tailscale serve --service=svc:web-server --https=443
| 127.0.0.1:8080
|
| > http://web-server.<tailnet-name>.ts.net:443/ > |-- proxy
| http://127.0.0.1:8080
|
| > When you use the tailscale serve command with the HTTPS
| protocol, Tailscale automatically provisions a TLS
| certificate for your unique tailnet DNS name.
|
| So is the certificate not valid? The 'Limitations' section
| doesn't mention anything about TLS either:
|
| https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-
| services#limit...
| zackify wrote:
| tailscale serve 4000 --BG
|
| Problem solved ;)
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I wonder why each service doesn't have a different subdomain.
| tylerflick wrote:
| This is the way. You can even do it with mDNS.
| cortesoft wrote:
| That's what I do, but you still have to change the default
| Bitwarden behavior to match on host rather than base domain.
|
| Matching on base domain as the default was surprising to me
| when I started using Bitwarden... treating subdomains as the
| same seems dangerous.
| photon_collider wrote:
| Ah nice! Didn't know that. I'll try that out next time.
| techcode wrote:
| Setup AdGuard-Home for both blocking ads and internal/split
| DNS, plus Caddy or another reverse proxy and buy (or
| recycle/reuse) a domain name so you can get SSL certificates
| through LetsEncrypt.
|
| You don't need to have any real/public DNS records on that
| domain, just own the domain so LetsEncrypt can verify and give
| you SSL certificate(s).
|
| You setup local DNS rewrites in AdGuard - and point all the
| services/subdomains to your home servers IP, Caddy (or similar)
| on that server points it to the correct port/container.
|
| With TailScale or similar - you can also configure that all
| TailScale clients use your AdGuard as DNS - so this can work
| even outside your home.
|
| Thats how I have e.g.: https://portainer.myhome.top
| https://jellyfin.myhome.top ...etc...
| brownindian wrote:
| Could also use Cloudflare tunnels. That way:
|
| 1. your 1password gets a different entry each time for
| <service>.<yourdomain>.<tld>
|
| 2. you get https for free
|
| 3. Remote access without Tailscale.
|
| 4. Put Cloudflare Access in front of the tunnel, now you have a
| proper auth via Google or Github.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Yeesh, the last thing I want is remote access to my homelab.
| freetonik wrote:
| The author uses Restic + Backblaze B2 storage. I was recently
| setting up backups for my homebase as well, and went with Restic
| + BorgBase [0]. Not affiliated, just wanted to share that I think
| they have a nice service with a straight-forward pricing model.
| They are the company behind excellent Pikapods [1], which may be
| interesting to the homelab crowd.
|
| [0] https://www.borgbase.com
|
| [1] https://www.pikapods.com
| natterangell wrote:
| I also use backrest/restic on my NAS, but I went with a Hetzner
| StorageBox instead, a little cheaper for 1TB (I pay 5USD
| monthly including VAT, billed monthly too).
| reddalo wrote:
| Me too, I highly recommend Hetzner Storage Box. It's cheap,
| and it works great (unlike their S3-compatible storage, which
| has been a huge fiasco since they launched it).
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| Could you elaborate on the issues with their S3 compatible
| storage? I've been considering it and haven't seen too many
| issues in my testing, beyond the lack of identity control.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I have something like this, in the same case. I have beefier
| specs b/c I use it as a daily workstation in addition to running
| all my stuff.
|
| * nginx with letsencrypt wildcard so I have lots of subdomains
|
| * No tailscale, just pure wireguard between a few family houses
| and for remote access
|
| * Jellyfin for movies and TV, serving to my Samsung TV via the
| Tizen jellyfin app
|
| * Mopidy holding my music collection, serving to my home stereo
| and numerous other speakers around the house via snapcast
| (raspberry pi 3 as the client)
|
| * Just using ubuntu as the os with ZFS mirroring for NAS, serving
| over samba and NFS
|
| * Home assistant for home automation, with Zigbee and Z-wave
| dongles
|
| * Frigate as my NVR, recording from my security cams, doing local
| object detection, and sending out alerts via Home Assistant
|
| * Forgejo for my personal repository host
|
| * tar1090 hooked to a SDR for local airplane tracking (antenna in
| attic)
|
| This all pairs nicely with my two openwrt routers, one being the
| main one and a dumb AP, connected via hardwire trunk line with a
| bunch of VLANs.
|
| Other things in the house include an iotawatt whole-house energy
| monitor, a bunch of ESPs running holiday light strips, indoor and
| outdoor homebrew weather stations with laser particulate sensors
| and CO2 monitors (alongside the usual sensors), a water-main
| cutoff (zwave), smart bulbs, door sensors, motion sensors,
| sirens/doorbells, and a thing that listens for my fire alarm and
| sends alerts. Oh and I just flashed the pura scent diffuser my
| wife bought and lobotomized it so it can't talk to the cloud
| anymore, but I can still automate it.
|
| I love it and have tons of fun fiddling with things.
| pajamasam wrote:
| Impressive that all that can run on one machine. Mind sharing
| the specs?
| cyberpunk wrote:
| You could easily run all of that on a rpi...
| tclancy wrote:
| No, you definitely can't. Or at least, not 3B+. I wound up
| buying https://www.amazon.com/ACEMAGICIAN-M1-Computers-
| Computer-3-2... which was $50 less a month ago (!!) because
| so many things don't fit well. Immich is amazing, but you
| wouldn't get a lot of the coolness of it if you can't run
| the ai bits, which are quite heavy.
| drnick1 wrote:
| Not impressive at all. I run just about as many services,
| plus several game servers, on a Ryzen 5, and most of the time
| CPU usage is in the low single digits. Most stuff is idle
| most of the time. Something like a Home Assistant instance
| used by a single household is basically costless to run in
| terms of CPU.
| pajamasam wrote:
| Not costless in terms of RAM though, surely?
| c-hendricks wrote:
| I run similar (gitea, scrypted+ffmpeg instead of frigate,
| plex instead of jellyfin) plus some Minecraft servers, *arr
| stack, notes, dns, and my VM for development.
|
| It's an i7-4790k from 12 years ago, it barely breaks a sweat
| most hours of the day.
|
| It's not really that impressive, or (not to be a jerk) you've
| overestimated how expensive these services are to run.
| pajamasam wrote:
| Fair enough. How much RAM though?
| decryption wrote:
| 16GB would be plenty. I've got like a dozen services
| running on an 8GB i7-4970 and it's only using 5GB of RAM
| right now.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Video is usually offloaded too to the igpu on these. I have
| like 13 vms running on a AMD 3400g with 32gb
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Impressive that all that can run on one machine. Mind
| sharing the specs?
|
| Not GP but I have _lots_ of fun running VMs and lots of
| containers on an old HP Z440 workstation from 2014 or so.
| This thing has 64 GB of ECC RAM and costs next to nothing (a
| bit more now with RAM that went up). Thing is: it doesn 't
| need to be on 24/7. I only power it up when I first need it
| during the day. 14 cores Xeon for lots of fun.
|
| Only thing I haven't moved to it yet is Plex, which still
| runs on a very old HP Elitedesk NUC. Dunno if Plex (and/or
| Jellyfin) would work fine on an old Xeon: but I'll be trying
| soon.
|
| Before that I had my VMs and containers on a core i7-6700K
| from 2015 IIRC. But at some point I just wanted ECC RAM so I
| bought a used Xeon workstation.
|
| As someone commented: most services simply do not need _that_
| beefy of a machine. Especially not when you 're strangled by
| a 1 Gbit/s Internet connection to the outside world anyway.
|
| For compilation and overall raw power, my daily workstation
| is a more powerful machine. But for a homelab: old hardware
| is totally fine (especially if it's not on 24/7 and I
| _really_ don 't need access to my stuff when I sleep).
| wbjacks wrote:
| Have you tried using snapcast to broadcast sound from your
| Samsung tv? I gave it a shot and could never get past the
| latency causing unacceptable A/V delay, did you have any luck?
| xoa wrote:
| I'll admit I've still stuck with the original FreeBSD based
| TrueNAS, and still am kinda bummed they swapped it. So it's
| interesting to see a direct example of someone for whom the new
| Linux based version is clearly superior. I'm long since far, far
| more at the "self-hosted" vs "homelab" end of the spectrum at
| this point, and in turn have ended up splitting my roles back out
| again more vs all-in-one boxes. My NAS is just a NAS, my
| virtualization is done via proxmox on separate hardware with
| storage backing to the NAS via iSCSI, and I've got a third box
| for OPNsense to handle the routing functions. When I first
| compared, the new TrueNAS was slower (presumably that is at
| parity or better now?) and missing certain things of the old one,
| but already was much easier to have Synology or Docker style or
| the like "apps" AIO. That didn't interest me because I didn't
| want my NAS to have any duty but being a NAS, but I can see how
| it'd be far more friendly to someone getting going, or many small
| business setups. A sort of better truly open and supported "open
| Synology" (as opposed the xpenology project).
|
| Clearly it's worked for them here, and I'm happy to see it. Maybe
| the bug will truly bite them but there's so much incredibly
| capable hardware now available for a song and it's great to see
| anyone new experiment with bringing stuff back out of centralized
| providers in an appropriately judicious way.
|
| _Edit_ : I'll add as well, that this is one of those happy
| things that can build on itself. As you develop infrastructure,
| the marginal cost of doing new things drops. Like, if you already
| have a cheap managed switch setup and your own router setup
| whatever it is, now when you do something like the author
| describes you can give all your services IPs and DNS and so on,
| reverse proxy, put different things on their own VLANs and start
| doing network isolation that way, etc for "free". The bar of
| giving something new a shot drops. So I don't think there is any
| wrong way to get into it, it's all helpful. And if you don't have
| previous ops or old sysadmin experience or the like then various
| snags you solve along the way all build knowledge and skills to
| solve new problems that arise.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > splitting my roles back out again more
|
| The fiasco you can cause when you try fix, update, change etc
| makes this my favourite too.
|
| Household life is generally in some form of 'relax' mode in
| evening and at weekends. Having no internet or movies or
| whatever is poorly tolerated.
|
| I wish Apple was even slightly supportive of servers and Linux
| as the mini is such a wicked little box. I went to it to save
| power. Just checked - it averaged 4.7w over the past 30 days.
| It runs Ubuntu server in UTM which notably raises power usage
| but it has the advantage that Docker desktop isn't there.
| xoa wrote:
| > _The fiasco you can cause when you try fix, update, change
| etc makes this my favourite too._
|
| I think some of the difference between "self-hosted" vs
| "homelab" is in the answer to the question of "What happens
| if this breaks end of the day Friday?" An answer of "oh merde
| of le fan, immediate evening/weekend plans are now hosed" is
| on the self-hosted end of the spectrum, whereas "eh, I'll
| poke at it on Sunday when it's supposed to be raining or
| sometime next week, maybe" is on the other end. Does that
| make sense? There are a few pretty different ways to approach
| making your setup reliable/redundant but I think throwing
| more metal at the problem features in all of them one way or
| another. Plus if someone moves up the stack it can simply be
| a lot more efficient and performant, the sort of hardware
| suited for one role isn't necessarily as well suited for
| another and trying to cram too much into one box may result
| in someone worse AND more expensive then breaking out a few
| roles.
|
| But probably a lot of people who ended up doing more hosting
| started pretty simple, dipping their toes in the water,
| seeing how it worked out and building confidence. And having
| everything virtualized on a single box is a pretty easy and
| highly flexible way get going and experiment. Also if it's on
| a ZFS backing makes "reset/rollback world" quite straight
| forward with minimal understanding given you can just use the
| same snapshot mechanism for that as you do for all other
| data. Issues with circular dependencies and the like or what
| happens if things go down when it's not convenient for you to
| be around in person don't really matter that much. I think
| anything that lowers the barrier to entry is good.
|
| Of course, someone can have some of each too! Or be somewhere
| along the spectrum, not at one end or another.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > And having everything virtualized on a single box is a
| pretty easy and highly flexible way get going and
| experiment. Also if it's on a ZFS backing makes
| "reset/rollback world" quite straight forward with minimal
| understanding given you can just use the same snapshot
| mechanism for that as you do for all other data.
|
| Docker-compose isn't a backup, but from a fresh ubuntu
| server install, it'll have me back in 20 mins. Backing up
| the entire VM isn't too hard either.
|
| I was n a really sweet spot and then ESXi became
| intolerable. Though in fairness their website was alway
| pure hell.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > And having everything virtualized on a single box is a
| pretty easy and highly flexible way get going and
| experiment. Also if it's on a ZFS backing makes
| "reset/rollback world" quite straight forward with minimal
| understanding given you can just use the same snapshot
| mechanism for that as you do for all other data.
|
| Docker-compose isn't a backup, but from a fresh ubuntu
| server install, it'll have me back in 20 mins. Backing up
| the entire VM isn't too hard either.
|
| I was in a really sweet spot and then ESXi became
| intolerable. Though in fairness their website was alway
| pure hell.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| There was just not a good reason to stay with BSD, especially
| with NAS -> homeserver evolution.
|
| Really, we should rename that kind of devices to HSSS (Home
| Service Storage Server)
| vermaden wrote:
| I also regret that change.
|
| Big downgrade after moving to Linux:
|
| - https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2024/04/20/truenas-core-
| versu...
| ryandrake wrote:
| One of the most helpful realizations I had as I played around
| with self-hosting at home is that there is nothing magical
| about a NAS. You don't need special NAS software. You generally
| don't need wild filesystems, or containers or VMs or this-
| manager or that-webui. Most people just need Linux and NFS. Or
| Linux and SMB. And that's kind of it. The more layers running,
| the more that can fail.
|
| Just like you don't really need the official Pi-hole software.
| It's a wrapper around dnsmasq, so you really just need dnsmasq.
|
| A habit of boiling your application down to the most basic
| needs is going to let you run a lot more on your lab and do so
| a lot more reliably.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Same with a router. Any Linux box with a couple of (decent)
| NICs is a powerful router. You just need to configure it.
|
| But for my own sanity I prefer out of the box solutions for
| things like my router and NAS. Learning is great but
| sometimes you really just need something to work right now!
| globular-toast wrote:
| I'm similar to you[0]. I still run FreeBSD TrueNAS, and it's
| just a NAS. Although I do run the occasional VM on it as the
| box is fairly overprovisioned. I run all my other stuff on an
| xcp-ng box. I'm a little more homelab-y as I do run stuff on a
| fairly pointless kubernetes cluster, but it's for learning
| purposes.
|
| I really prefer storage just being storage. For security it
| makes a lot of sense. Stuff on my network can only access
| storage via NFS. That means if I were to get malware on my
| network and it corrupted data (like ransomware), it won't be
| able to touch the ZFS snapshots I make every hour. I know
| TrueNAS is well designed and they are using Docker etc, but it
| still makes me nervous.
|
| I guess when I finally have to replace my NAS I'll have to go
| Linux, but it'll still be just a NAS for me.
|
| [0] https://blog.gpkb.org/posts/homelab-2025/
| hk1337 wrote:
| This is a lot of my similar setup in hardware. I just repurposed
| a PC I was using for windows that I barely used anyways. I would
| like to move that to a Framework Desktop mounted in my mini rack
| at some point though.
|
| I ended up making my own dashboard app, not as detailed as
| Scrutiny because I just wanted a central place that linked to all
| my internal apps so I didn't have to remember them all and have a
| simple status check. I made my own in Go though because main ones
| I found were NodeJS and were huge resource hogs.
| EdNutting wrote:
| Have a look at Headscale to avoid the cost of Tailscale for small
| home setups.
| drnick1 wrote:
| This, or simply expose a VPN (Wireguard) port on a public IP. I
| don't see why you need to involve any third parties in such a
| setup.
| EdNutting wrote:
| For a single machine, yeah Wireguard is fine. For my multi-
| user multi-machine many-service home lab, it's quite helpful
| to have the extra small features that Headscale offers (and
| some it exposes in a more convenient way).
|
| Edit: Tailscale has a fairly frank page on Wireguard vs
| Tailscale with suggestions on when to use which:
| https://tailscale.com/compare/wireguard
| SauntSolaire wrote:
| I believe Tailscale is free to use for small home setups. It's
| limited to 3 users and 100 devices which has been plenty for my
| homelab setup.
| xandrius wrote:
| One thing to consider before doing the same, a computer done for
| homelab has a much lower consumption.
|
| The setup mentioned in the article has an avg 600 kWh/year as
| opposed to a pretty solid HP EliteDesk (my own homelab) which
| uses 100 kWh/year. Sure you don't get a GPU but for what it is
| used for, you might as well use a laptop for that.
| hparadiz wrote:
| I've been thinking of tearing down my old gaming desktop (same
| as OP) and using a 2014 Macbook Pro instead for exactly this
| reason.
| polairscience wrote:
| A lot of people are talking about their backup storage solutions
| in here, but it's mostly about corporate cloud providers. I'm
| curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and
| using off-prem storage at a friend's house.
|
| Which is to say, hardware is cheap, software is open, and privacy
| is very hard to come by. Thus I've been thinking I'd like to not
| use cloud providers and just keep a duplicate system at a
| friends, and then of course return the favor. This adds a lot of
| privacy and quite a bit of redundancy. With the rise of wireguard
| (and tailscale I suppose), keeping things connected and private
| has never been easier.
|
| I know that leaning on social relationships is never a hot trend
| in tech circles but is anyone else considering doing this? Anyone
| done it? I've never seen it talked about around here.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _hardware is cheap_
|
| Hardware _was_ cheap a year ago. Whoever managed to build their
| boxes full of cheap RAM and HDDs, great, they did the right
| thing. It will be some time until such an opportunity presents
| itself again.
| nsbk wrote:
| My off-prem backups are in a Tailscale connected NAS at my
| parent's house. I'm in the process of talking a friend into
| having Tailscale configured to host more off-prem backups at
| his place as well. I'm moving out of iCloud for photo library
| management and into Immich. I really don't want to lose my
| photos and videos hence the off-prem backups. Tailscale has
| been a blessing for this kind of use case
| polairscience wrote:
| Oooo. That's the other thing I need to figure out, because
| it's 90% for my photography. How have you liked immich? Have
| you tried any other options?
| mtsolitary wrote:
| I get 3-2-1 backups with no "big cloud" dependency using - My
| Mac - My NAS (RAID1) using Syncthing - Incremental borg backups
| to rsync.net (geo-redundant plan) with a cron job.
| Evan-Purkhiser wrote:
| I do something like this! I'm based in NY but my dad's in LA. I
| put together an rpi5 + 5xSATA hat with 3 10TB WD red drives
| using zraid1 (managed to pick these up over the holidays before
| prices started going up, $160 per drive!). 3D printed the case
| and got it running a diskless alpine image with tailscale and
| zrepl for ZFS snapshot replication. Just left it running in a
| corner at his place and told him not to touch it heh
|
| Whole thing cost around $500. Before that I was paying ~$35 a
| month for a Google workspace with 5TB of drive space. At one
| point in the past it was "unlimited" space for $15 a month.
| Figure the whole thing will pay for itself in the next couple
| of years.
|
| Actually just finished the initial replication of my 10TB pool.
| I ran into a gnarly situation where zrepl blew away the initial
| snapshot on the source pool just after it finished syncing, and
| I ended up having to patch in a new fake "matching" snapshot. I
| had claude write up a post here, if you'll excuse the
| completely AI generated "blog post", it came up with a pretty
| good solution
| https://gist.github.com/evanpurkhiser/7663b7cabf82e6483d2d29...
| ritcgab wrote:
| Hard pass whenever you host long-term storage without ECC memory.
| benlivengood wrote:
| I've started building a kubernetes cluster (Talos Linux) across
| town with wireguard between various houses. ZFS boxes for
| persistent volumes (democratic-csi) in each "zone" with cross-
| site snapshot replication and Gateway (Traefik) running at each
| site behind the ISP. CrunchyPGO allows separate StorageClasses to
| easily split the leader/followers up.
| nickorlow wrote:
| Have had issues w/ doing k8s over residential wan once I had
| enough hosts in my cluster
|
| (though they were halfway across the US from each other, and
| not town)
| gehsty wrote:
| I'm using a refurbed m4 Mac mini, connected to a unifi nas pro 8,
| super fun and straightforward. Feels like I only have to do the
| tinkering I want to do.
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| you can use https://nginxproxymanager.com/ to manage various
| services on your homelab. it works flawlessly with Tailscale - I
| can connect to my tailnet and simply type
| http://service.mylocaldomain to open the service. you will also
| need adguard -> adguard dns rewrite -> *.mylocaldomain forwards
| to the NPM instance and NPM instance has all the information of
| which IP:PORT has which service Also tailscale DNS should be
| configured to use adguard -> you can turnoff adblock features if
| it interferes with any of your stuff.
|
| I would also suggest to use two instances of adguards - one as
| backup two instances of NPM.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| I never understood using a NAS OS and hosting non-NAS services
| there, it feels upside down. I would rather have a general
| purpose server OS with running NAS services. Same applies to
| Proxmox.
| denkmoon wrote:
| Proxmox is just Debian with a qemu and lxc webui. You can do
| anything with it
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