A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Hardware-wise:
Software wise, too many projects to count lol
Last year I wanted to set up a budget media PC and got enamored by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCDmHljsinY
I got a 600 G3 with the 4560 processor, installed Debian onto it and hooked it to my 4k TV mainly to run immich and stremio.
Immich runs just fine, though I have gotten too fast behind its upgrades and having less knowledge about Docker, I'm afraid to update immich. Need to figure that out.
But what disappointed me was that my good quality videos (even the downloaded ones) are choppy to run (unlike the fluid expectations from the video above) and I don't really know what I should look into to make it better.
From a hardware perspective I need more storage. Am thinking I'll probably end up with a second Synology NAS unit before the end of the year with 4 hard drives at whatever a reasonable price vs size point it at the time I do it (likely 12-14Tb drives at this stage). Bought drives 2 at a time last time so I'm running two RAID1 pairs right now on the existing unit - adding 4 new drives at once to the home lab will let me move all that content to the new drives and reformat the existing ones into a RAID5 array and get an extra 12Tb of storage.
The one I already have does support adding the 5 drive expansion bay, but figuring that with a second NAS I can move some of my Docker instances currently running on a dedicated laptop onto the second NAS which takes one computer out of the setup as well.
Maintenance wise I've just only done my 2024 maintenance stuff that I do each year. This year it was going through my password vault and making sure everything was synced up, had complex passwords, had two factor enabled where applicable, etc, as well as setting up unique email addresses for every service I'm using (they just forward to the same inbox) to help me track who's been selling my info. Have already found a local fast food outlet who has from that.
Have also rotated all my SSH keys, made sure they were all upgraded to Ed25519 from RSA, set up unique keys for the three devices I regularly use so I can revoke one individually if required, made sure all my hardware was running the latest updates (my RPi running my Pi-hole instance was still on Buster so I had to get that updated before I could even update Pi-hole), etc.
Also swapped my Mullvad connection on my gateway to use Wireguard instead of OpenVPN since they're dropping support later this year.
Honestly I'd love to invest in some sort of rack mounting for home, its something I should look into some more, but right now I just have a whole section of the wardrobes in my study for equipment and tech storage. It's working for now although I worry about it in summer with not a massive amount of heat dissipation in there. This weekend is supposed to be close to 40 degrees Celsius both days 🥵
My server is exactly as I need. Basically 1 year old now. This year I really want to do vlans to control the network more than an off the shelf router. I work in tech and still am struggling because all I know is meraki bullshit and that's not priced for the typical home user.
I'll need a few AP's and a switch and firewall. I don't know what to get or what to buy and each research session ends with more options than I started with. Anyway that's my goal. I'll get there eventually.
Right now it's really just setting up DNScrypt, and maybe swapping some equipment out for lower power consumption.
Thinking about setting up a NixOS or Guix firewall/router. I like OpenWRT but upgrades are a bit annoying, although should improve with the new packaging system.
The idea of having a single config file I can deploy on new hardware almost immediately is very appealing, however.
I will be moving my entire homelab to a different country, which currently consist of two kubernetes nodes, a NAS and various home automation devices. I will be scaling down gradually, taking cold storage backups of everything and plan to resurrect everything on new hardware once I have moved.
I just reached all my goals at the end of 2024. So stretch goal in my case.
40 gig network for private ceph traffic. Do aggregation on all the nodes for redundancy. Maybe expand to 5 nodes from 3.
Get VLANs working, proper IOT network isolation, and Nextcloud as my primary document storage. If that first one didn't bring down my homelab entry time I try I'd be more inclined.
Buy a NAS , sell my old gaming pc (acting as 1 node in my proxmox cluster of 2), buy a second mini pc, learn more about backups and fallbacks and all that fun stuff
Rebuilding my main router to work with 10gbe fiber that recently became available here. Although it is a tad expensive, so I am not actually sure yet if I will upgrade my contract.
I want to look into quadlets
A pain in the ass. Great but did not fit my needs. Dependent containers would fail a lot during upgrades. Kept trying to figure it out and then just said WTF am I doing this all works fine in docker.
Get everything migrated across to my new k3s cluster. I’ve been using larger boxes (unraid) and a couple of 1L mini PCs with proxmox to run my homelab until now.. but I work with kubernetes and terraform daily and wanted something declarative.
I’ve now got k3s setup with a handful of services migrated (Immich, Tailscale, Nextcloud etc) but there’s still a ton to go (arr suite, various databases, Plex, Tautulli etc). It’s another job entirely.
I love it but sometimes I wonder why I do this to myself 😅
I'm still in the middle of a K8s migration. It's overkill for a home user, but I want the upskilling.
I've got a QNAP NAS with self-managed linux for storage, and a MS-01 with an RTX A2000 for compute. They're connected over 10Gb SFP+. I'm more than half way done, especially considering I mostly know what I'm doing now.
I still need to figure out the idiomatically right way to schedule pods with their storage, but I got GPU workloads going recently. Next up is migrate the last of the docker-compose from the storage node.
I want to build a whole new server, starting with a wooden case that makes it perfectly silent (but allows for good air flow).
Btw: does anybody know what bad things actually happen if there is no metal cage that blocks all the radio?
Part of the *arr stack, to find some obscur films and old series.
Top 1 for me would be a strong backup mechanism, and by that I mean something that is tested. Currently I have restic in place but I don't even know if in case of a disaster the backups are ok.
And considering my lack of time, I would be happy with just that.