State of Homelab 2026(mrlokans.work) |
State of Homelab 2026(mrlokans.work) |
https://www.xda-developers.com/cloudflare-tunnels-are-great-...
For an easy GUI solution for the latter, highly recommend Nginx Proxy Manager.
Tailscale (but not Headscale) offers Funnel, which is a reverse proxy, but you cannot use it with your own domain.
Pangolin is the closest alternative to CF Tunnel, but self-hosted NetBird with reverse proxy functionality can also be used.
Personally I'm switching to rathole+traefik, weirdly something I was researching and experimenting with in the early hours of this morning (I have now not slept and have to go to work).
https://tailscale.com/docs/concepts/domain-ownership
This let's you use your own domain for your tailnet, isn't the funnel but - but isn't it even better? Unless you actually want a publicly routable domain name, then you're back some hosted ingress I guess
You can't have one without the other.
Man, paying Google/Apple $5/mo is surely a much better solution for her. And are you really doing 3-2-1 on that?
Save the dicking around for your own stuff.
And at $180/yr for the 2TB of storage we'd need to pay for, vs. maybe $200 in hardware, it pays itself off pretty quickly... if you exclude the time spent setting it up and administering it. But I don't mind, it's a bit like digital gardening for me.
Just some days back someone on reddit posted how their 14yo son (via a family/linked Google account) used Gemini Live to, err, enjoy himself with the camera on.
All his accounts are now permanently locked for CSAM.
So, yes, not being beholden to a megacorp absolutely has its uses.
According to which criteria?
There are values beyond "basic convenience" that are important as well. Being independent from a subscription service is one of them. Having full control over your own media being another.
Moreover, subscriptions in general have disadvantages. For example:
1. If a subscription service decides to increase their prices tenfold, there is nothing a customer can do to stop them.
2. If they decide to stop operating completely, a customer also has no say into the matter.
3. If the subscription service decides to just unilaterally stop offering the service to a particular user, they can do so at their own discretion, at any time.
This all means that whatever value is being "obtained" by using a subscription service, it is only going to last for as long as the provider wants it to last.
Of all the dicking around one can do in a homelab, and I'm guilty of plenty of it, setting up some network storage for photo backup is easily one of the highest value things you can do.
Brothers, maybe they don't want you to see all their private chats with AI?
For me, I run Immich off a Beelink S12 Pro mini PC, with the photos themselves stored on my Synology NAS. Every night, I backup the VM with docker that runs Immich to the NAS, then the entire NAS gets backed up to Synology’s Cloud. My upfront costs were the NAS, the drives, and the mini PC, and my ongoing costs are electricity and the cloud storage fee for Synology’s cloud (about $70/year for a terabyte). That’s not cheaper than Google, but it does prevent them from having access to photos of my kids and family.
My personal backup has been flawless (so far).
Would have spent a couple thousand $ by now, if stayed on it.
and yes, most people willing to endeavor into the area are hobbyist, with all that entails
however, reading even one story of someone losing access to their cloud photos for xyz reason, is enough to decide that you ought to have some mechanism in place to ensure ownership of your data
Cost wise on the right hardware it is very cheap to run, add the privacy/personal control aspect it's no wonder so many people do it.
At the very least, it should be a separate network segment between 'things that have to run all the time, especially for other people' and the network you set up weird storage arrays or BGP or whatever you're having fun with.
It’d be a great way for kids to learn to operate services and a great alternative for anyone who wants to use the fantastic open source stuff that’s out there but lacks expertise or time.
The problem with bespoke anything in computers is always the support.
No one wants to be on the hook for customer support. I absolutely agree with them.
There are a ton of "services" that exist solely to enable people to cut a check and say "Customer support is over there. Go talk to them and leave me alone."
There’s still cloudflare in the middle of the everything and it doesn’t make it “independent”.
I started from a similar place as you and then eventually now my IaaC for my homelab is just idempotent bash scripts written by Claude. The pattern I find with dependencies is that they have the property that someone wants to change some attribute and so the program needs to evolve for the attribute to be changeable. This means programs evolve to have many hinges and the interactions cause bugs one cannot reason about.
My needs for the homelab are fairly simple and the script can encode all the information it needs. As a human, writing such a script is tedious. As a human with an AI assistant, I've found that this is so much easier to worry about because bash is a fairly stable target.
Anyway, apart from that, I landed on using systemd's containers that use podman but otherwise not too different. My (far less polished) version of this post as a memory aid to myself: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/One_Quick_Way_To_Host_A_WebA...
- Portainer running on GMKtec & ProLiant
- Dozzle (docker log viewer) on GMKtec & ProLiant
- Beszel (server monitoring, awesome) all hosts
- Kubetail (Kubernetes log viewer on Pi K8s)
- HomeAssistant
- Jellyfin
- UptimeKuma (uptime and notifications)
- Semaphore UI (ansible playbook runner)
- Metabase (querying and visualization for dbs)I see lots of people complaining on power with their re-used ProLiant and others etc. Is it the throttling or bios settings that messes with the idle power?
Or are you just running it at 100% and my low usage is what saves my electricity bill?
The nas is going to pay itself off in a few months, then it’s all savings from there. If only these media billionaires didn’t get so greedy, I would have happily kept paying them.
Especially with Claude code, setting up something like this is basically just sitting down and prompting for a couple of hours.
The emerging benefits are nice too. Like we don’t have to sift through junk of Netflix or Hulu to find stuff we would actually watch. All of it is stuff we would watch because we added it ourselves. Really fun!
I'd honestly rather apps stop providing hosted media and just do the delivery, let me worry about backing up history. iMessage seems to be the only one sending things in full quality.
I don't mind paying for what I consume, but God damn is the value proposition at the floor currently. Here even the rather expensive mid tier subscription gives you 1080p at most with all the big players. It's as if they somehow converged to this model and aren't competing anymore. Coincidence, I'm sure.
For accessing my home network I've rented a 1€-VPS that acts as a Wireguard connection hub.
1 Core with 512MB RAM combined with Wireguard easily shuffles a few GBit/s.
Self hosting is hosting services and data you actively use. While I don't seek 99.9999% of availability, this is not where I want to explore and break things on purpose.
Homelab is en environment one use to learn and that is ready to be scratched/broken for the sake of learning. This is definitely not the place where I want to host my personnal services and files (or at least not as primary copy/endpoint).
On top of that, resellers also often have upgrades for RAM and NVME available. WD-Red OEM 1Tb for less than 100 dollars sounds like bargain.
That's an 11th gen Intel Core CPU, not 5th.
Ironically once I got over the hump of learning NixOS, I can't imagine using anything else for declarative configuration. Too lazy to use a traditional system which requires custom wiring.
If I overcome my laziness, I'm going to invest a bit into Tailscale/WireGuard set-up, with some bastion host perhaps.
That said: I do also tunnel HTTP, and I've come to terms with the privacy risk. Being able to setup enforcement of things like mTLS at the edge is quite nice.
Interestingly, in the early hours of this morning I switched from Cloudflare Tunnels to a rathole/traefik based solution (well, currently it's port forwarding and a low grade home-baked dyndns solution until I get paid and can afford a cheap hetzner box because I spent all of my money again).
I switched back because I didn't like the added complexity of having to manage the routes, what I'm using it for is technically against ToS, and I like the self-contained nature of my microk8s cluster.
Tailscale/Wireguard is overkill because it is not needed where access controls work fine which is true for the majority of the popular self-hosted apps. And you now have to install a VPN client/cert on every device you want to access your services from. That's a major oof.
My spouse is more tired to Google, but for myself if I got cut off i'd just have to change some recovery email addresses.
And another cpu+chipset is always going to eat som Watts just by existing.
I understand a lot of people run services locally for other reasons, but HTTPS termination defeats any privacy argument.
Cloudflare are essentially the largest MitM data collector in the world. A few people started moving their data out of the cloud and they saw the gap. Now they're plugging that gap "for free".
A few times I've wanted to print something and found it was sent over an IM app and compressed to 100kb rendering it useless.
Using a VPS entirely removes the hardware aspect, but it also mostly defeats the point of self hosting.
Google even came out and said that’s not how account suspensions work: They don’t sequentially ban other accounts that have been associated with a device that was associated with an account, as many pointed out.
I’m surprised how many people fell for that obvious piece of Reddit creative fiction. I think we’ll be hearing about it as an urban legend for years.
Reddit has become a place for posting fiction on advice subs. It started on the relationship advice subs but has spread to all of the advice subs now, like the legal advice post you saw. You have to read Reddit with a lot of skepticism.
Unfortunately I have seen other horror stories (dad takes a picture to send to the doctor, it uploads to iCloud/Google photos, account gets banned) to be wary of trusting any such large corp.
Partly tangential, but just yesterday there was a post of someone with a checzk password who got locked out of their iPhone. Now of course an iCloud backup might have actually helped them here, but the reliance on "It's Apple, it'll work" is a very common thing (understandably!), but unfortunately not true.
(You can go to the legal advice UK subreddit if you want to see the post.)
It was removed quickly because it was obviously untrue. The details of the story weren’t even consistent across the posters comments.
We back it up daily using restic to an old 2TB NAS that's at my parents place + the occasional manual backup
Backup to cloud glacier storage is ~$1.20 per TiB-month
Cost is absolutely a factor. self-hosting can't even be touched. And, the that's just the start of the value proposition.
If it was just for backuping my photos I would just buy an external hard drive or 2 tough
https://ente.com is open source, and self hosted, and end to end encrypted.