Finally, I have fully “settled in” to my new place after the move and have had enough free time & proper motivation to jump back into my Homelabbing foray. I’ve already have a couple thoughts on what I want to do & what I want to change (goodbye Emby), but I know that there is a WORLD of things out there, and I’ve only begun to scratch the surface.
Being still so relatively fresh, I’m curious to hear about what kind of services you all on the forums are potentially running on your home setups. What led you to deploying some of these services, and if there are alternatives, what ultimately led you to deploying the one you did?
I’m currently renting a VPS so it’s technically not a Homelab. Experimented with a RSS app (Miniflux) but I’m not using it enough so I’m just going to take it down in the coming weeks. The only thing I find essential for now is a password manager. I am self hosting Vaultwarden and this feels like a real step forward in avoiding dependencies on tech companies. When I’m migrating my VPS setup to a real homelab on a physical server at my house, I’m probably going to keep Vaultwarden and only add services as needed.
When adding other services, I think you should be as critical as when buying new games? (‘do I really need this?’) A lot of software is free of price, but with every service you add to your homelab, the maintenance/time costs are going up.
Some day I’ll have a decent home server system. But for now my home setup is an anemic Synology DS218+ 2-bay NAS + 16 GB memory stick. I use the NAS as the primary storage location for all the important files in the family. I also run (too many) docker containers on the NAS for all my applications below. Remote access is accomplished through Cloudflare’s DNS proxy.
Plex & Jellyfin: Accessing the movies, TV shows, and music I own.
In the process of retiring Plex. My wife still uses Plex Amp for listening to music and I haven’t found a Jellyfin alternative to recommend her yet.
Nextcloud: Replacement for Google Drive/Onedrive. My wife and I use it for syncing documents between computers and auto-backup photos from my phone.
Vaultwarden: Reimplementation of Bitwarden’s server APIs in RUST. My wife and I use it as our password manager
Podsync: A simple application for taking a YouTube channel/playlist and turning it into a audio podcast RSS feed. I use this for videos I want to listen to while driving to/from work and there isn’t already a podcast feed. I have it set up to watch a playlist I add videos to.
RustDesk Server: An open source remote desktop application, like TeamViewer. I use it for accessing my home desktop when traveling.
I don’t have a very comprehensive homelab setup but I am all about backing up my media, both physical and digital and I have UMS or Universal Media Server as my proxy for Plex, I tried Jellyfin but it wasn’t playing nice with my Cachy OS media PC for some reason, it essentially just works as a network browser, not much GUI included but the simplicity is very nice. works on smart devices as well.
Most definitely, I think Homelabbing is another rabbit hole that is easy to get swept up in the thrill of being able to deploy any little thing with little to no regard to what it is— just simply because you can. Getting bogged down with maintenance is undoubtedly one of the friction points that will burn me out from the hobby, I’m not really in love with the idea of regularly loosing a weekend just because some service that I (or other users) are having issues with it. So, I very much do want to keep a very critical & lean approach. “Does this bring value to my household” and “Will this be a service that I can build systems, habits, or workflows around that will improve my life"?” are likely going to be my guiding questions.
Jellyfin is definitely what I’m likely looking to swap to, along with deploying RustDesk. Had no clue about Plex Amp before, insanely feature rich so understand how it’s a tough one to swap from. Appreciate your list!
That’s me and Nextcloud. I got started with it in docker before the AIO image was the recommendation. It takes five different containers to run the application: web service, database, cache, https proxy, certificate management for https proxy.
Early on I learned the hard way what happened if you didn’t keep up with NC updates. You can’t skip major release versions during upgrades (ex 32 to 34). It completely breaks the application and there is little to no fixing it without starting over. So following the basic instructions to “pull the ‘latest’ docker image” can really bite you. I literally have to put more thought and testing in upgrading Nextcloud than I do for most applications I manage at work.
I often go down the rabbit hole of installing a bunch of services to host all the things, but usually it just ends up being arr services and JellyFin. Maybe my RSS reader I always forget to use.
Cancelling my arr services this year so just JellyFin at the moment.
I completely forgot to include the instance of FreshRSS I run on the shared host for my personal website/blog. I started with using RSS with Google Reader to read sites like Engadget, Gizmodo, and Arstechnica way back in 2010 after Digg v4 imploded. Then Google killed Reader in 2013 and instead of switching to another cloud reader, like The Old Reader or Feedly, I found TinyTinyRSS and managed to get it up and running on shared hosting, even though the developer highly discourage the setup.
After running TTRSS for more than a decade I made the switch to FreshRSS this year for a number of reasons: TTRSS web interface was never touch/mobile friendly, the TTRSS developer stopped publishing their mobile app to the Play Store, and they finally decided to step away from the project altogether and let other people keep TTRSS going.
On my laptop, I use FreshRSS’s web interface to scroll, open, and swipe away stories. On mobile, I’m using Capy Reader.
I’ve also been looking to get into homelabbing for a long time now, but haven’t got to it yet. Following services are ones I would want to use and think are pretty important/useful:
Media server for viewing photos and videos (Jellyfin, Plex, …)
Music streaming (Navidrome)
Personal wiki (Docmost, XWiki, …)
Storage (NextCloud, Synology, TrueNAS, …)
Monitoring of the system
The options are endless imo, and it’s always fun to just play around with it and see where it ends. You can always install/setup any service you want and test it out, and if you don’t like/use it you can always shut it down to make room for any other service. Here’s some videos I’ve watched to get to know the possibilities a bit better:
I’m surprised to not see Frigate on more lists! I use it with a Reolink and a RPi zero camera to watch my front and back yard. Also, not sure if folks would consider it homelab, but OctoPrint controls my Creality and gives me a camera view of my ongoing prints. I don’t have anything for video, but I do use Navidrome to serve up all my music. I find using my pihole can be a bit of a fight, a lot of modern browsers really want to force you into using their own DNS services with DoH. But for small devices it still works great.
not a lot right now I do want to get back into self hosting but storage prices and stuff is fricked now
right now Im running
AMP (PAID SOFTWARE) on a little n150 miniPC for running a few minecraft servers and the occasional other game its been really cool to be able to use a unifi travel router I picked up to meet up with a friend and play some modded mineraft and other things feels like magic
miniflux (hosted via pikapods) for RSS stuff need to test it more just been way to distracted with yt and stuff (though I do really want to look more intro indie web stuff and try to read more written word stuff in general) and stuff not sure if im 100% happy with yet so might be looking for some other tool
in the future I want to get a jellyfin server setup to see what that’s all about and I have a bunch my favorite YouTube videos id like to put on it iv saved here and there since iv been reminded that the internet sometimes isn’t as good at remembering as you think… also got a list of shows and stuff id like to backed up on it though I want to make sure I dont go crazy..
I also used to have a navidrome server so I might do that again to just never found any client I was happy with.
want to also get around to setting up NAS and a proper backup solution just so I dont have to worry as much about linux being linux since im trying to switch backover to it cause im not happy with macOS right now(probably user error idk) (or any apple product anymore except the iPod I found in a drawer while looking for my ssd the other day! this things been really fun since I haven’t found a music app on android im happy with yet) right now
