Homelab

TL;DR: Don’t do anything illegal. Jump to the Totally Legal Use Cases section for all the cool legal use-cases. Intro In Part 1, I walked through building my Unraid server — migrating from a mini-PC and laying the hardware foundation for a reliable homelab. The goal: build a flexible, automated media server that runs cleanly and requires minimal manual intervention. In this post, I’ll cover how I automated everything using Docker, Trash Guides, and a suite of containers — including Plex, Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr, and more — all working together to provide a seamless media experience. ...

Why Excalidraw is perfect! Initially, I thought I found a gem. Easy to use, not bloated, unique style and open source? Too go to be true. But after using it I’ve noticed it more in the wild. And after using it for a few months I understand why. What’s so great about diagrams and graphics? Unlike other DevOps-sy people, I actually like writing documentation. Both in my Homelab but also at work. What I don’t like is boring, shitty documentation. For me, that means to break up the text with things. Does not have to be anything impressive, but a little code block or a picture goes a long way. Especially if it helps understanding the subject of the documentation. ...

Why I use Beszel for monitoring my Homelab When it comes to Homelab tinkering and DevOps projects, monitoring is a must — but I’ve don’t want to spend hours setting up/maintaining tools just to know if a VM or container is online. After testing solutions like Grafana/Prometheus or Glances, Beszel has become my favorite lightweight option. It’s simple, fast to deploy, and does exactly what I need without the overhead. ...

Battle of the Dashboards: Homepage vs. Homarr vs. Heimdall For a lot of people functionality is king. But anyone who read my Unraid Server Guide knows that a consistent design is almost as important in my opinion. In the world of homelabbing, a good dashboard is more than just eye candy — it’s your command center. Whether you’re tracking services, monitoring uptime, or just flexing your setup, a dashboard ties it all together. ...

Introduction: My Allrounder Server As a DevOps Engineer and homelab tinkerer, reliable and flexible storage and a central platform to run services on is essential. That’s where a home server comes in! Initially I just wanted something to run Home Assistant on. But after the streaming landscape got more anti-consumer with every new platform, introduction of ads in lower price tiers, the nth price increase and the overall low bitrate of content, I had to look for something that could host and play media as well. ...

The primary objective of this setup is to provide secure and convenient access to internal homelab services from any location without direct exposure to the public internet. This is achieved by leveraging a trusted mesh VPN (Tailscale), a flexible reverse proxy (Caddy), and robust DNS management (Cloudflare). Core Components Tailscale: The Secure Network Fabric Tailscale establishes a private, encrypted mesh network connecting all authenticated devices and homelab servers. Access Control: Remote access to any homelab service is exclusively facilitated through a client device connected to the Tailscale network. Direct public internet exposure of services is actively avoided. Internal Routing: All inter-service communication within the homelab, including Caddy’s forwarding of requests to backend services, occurs over Tailscale’s encrypted tunnels using their respective Tailscale IP addresses. Caddy: Reverse Proxy and SSL Automation Caddy functions as the central reverse proxy within the Tailscale network. ...