12 ms·

My Self-Hosting Setup

612 points by mirdaki 1y ago

mirdaki 1y ago
Hey y'all, I know getting a setup that feels "right" can be a process. We all have different goals, tech preferences, etc. I wanted to a share my blog post walking through how I finally built a setup that I can just be happy with and use. It goes over my goals, requirements, tech choices, layout, and some specific problems I've resolved. Where I've landed of course isn't where everyone else will, but I hope it can serve as a good reference. I’ve really benefited from the content and software folks have freely shared, and hope I can continue that and help others.
- redrove 1y ago
  How are you finding Nix for the homelab to be? Every time I try it I just end up confused, maybe next time will be the charm. The reason I ask is I homelab “hardcore”; i.e. I have a 25U rack and I run a small Kubernetes cluster and ceph via Talos Linux. Due to various reasons, including me running k8s in the lab for about 7 years now, I’ve been itching to change and consolidate and simplify, and every time i think about my requirements I somehow end up where you did: Nix and ZFS. All those services and problems are very very familiar to me, feel free to ask me questions back btw.
  - MisterKent 1y ago
    I've been trying to switch my home cluster from Debian + K3s to Talos but keep running into issues. What does your persistent storage layer look like on Talos? How have you found it's hardware stability over the long term?
    - esseph 1y ago
      Talos is the Linux kernel at heart, so.. just fine.
    - redrove 1y ago
      >What does your persistent storage layer look like on Talos? Well, for its own storage: it's an immutable OS that you can configure via a single YAML file, it automatically provisions appropriate partitions for you, or you can even install the ZFS extension and have it use ZFS (no zfs on root though). For application/data storage there's a myriad of options to choose from[0]; after going back and forth a few times years ago with Longhorn and other solutions, I ended up at rook-ceph for PVCs and I've been using it for many years without any issues. If you don't have 10gig networking you can even do iSCSI from another host (or nvmeof via democratic-csi but that's quite esoteric). >How have you found it's hardware stability over the long term? It's Linux so pretty good! No complaints and everything just works. If something is down it's always me misconfiguring or a hardware failure. [0] https://www.talos.dev/v1.11/kubernetes-guides/configuration/storage/#storage-clusters https://www.talos.dev/v1.11/kubernetes-guides/configuration/...
      - avtar 1y ago
        > after going back and forth a few times years ago with Longhorn and other solutions, I ended up at rook-ceph for PVCs Curious to know what issues you ran into with Longhorn.
        redrove 1y ago
        It was years ago but I recall high CPU usage being an issue in particular. In general it's just not as battle tested as ceph and I needed something more bulletproof. However I will say this: I'm sure that issue with the CPU usage was fixed (I was watching the GitHub issue) and you might not need your distributed FS to be CERN ready for your lab; AND the UI and built-in backups Longhorn offers are great for beginners so I'd suggest giving it a try if you don't already know you want ceph or OpenEBS Mayastor for the performance and so on.
        avtar 1y ago
        Thanks! I haven’t had to implement replicated storage (still using EFS) but I was curious about Longhorn.
  - udev4096 1y ago
    Honestly, I personally like the combination of keepalived+docker(swarm if needed)+rsync for syncing config files. keepalived uses VRRP, which creates a floating IP. It's extremely lightweight and works like a charm. You won't even notice the downtime, the switch to another server IP is instant
    - cess11 1y ago
      Keepalived is great. Learning about it was one of the best things I got from building HA-aiming infra at a job once.
  - mirdaki 1y ago
    I certainly didn't take to Nix the first few times I looked at it. The language itself is unusual and the error messages leave much to be desired. And the split around Flakes just complicates things further (though I do recommend using them, once you set it up, it's simple and the added reproducibility gives nice peace of mind) But once I fully understood how it's features really make it easy for you to recover from mistakes and how useful the package options available from nixpkgs are, I decided it was time to sink in and figure it out. Looking at other folks nix config on GitHub (especially for specific services you're wanting to use) is incredibly helpful (mine is also linked in the post) I certainly don't consider myself to be a nix expert, but the nice thing is you can do most things by using other examples and modifying them till you feel good about it. Then overtime you just get more familiar with and just grow your skill Oh man, having a 25U rack sounds really fun. I have a moderate size cabinet I keep my server, desktop, a UPS, 10Gig switch, and my little fanless Home Assistant box. What's yours look like? I should add it to the article, but one of my anti-requirements was anything in the realm of high availability. It's neat tech to play with, but I can deal with downtime for most things if the trade off is everything being much simpler. I've played a little bit with Kubernetes at work, but that is a whole ecosystem I've yet to tackle
    - redrove 1y ago
      >The language itself is unusual and the error messages leave much to be desired. And the split around Flakes just complicates things further Those are my chief complaints as well, actually. I never quite got to the point where I grasped how all the bits fit together. I understand the DSL (though the errors are cryptic as you said) and the flakes seemed recommended by everyone yet felt like an addon that was forgotten about (you needed to turn them on through some experimental flag IIRC?). I'll give it another shot some day, maybe it'll finally make sense. >Oh man, having a 25U rack sounds really fun. I have a moderate size cabinet I keep my server, desktop, a UPS, 10Gig switch, and my little fanless Home Assistant box. What's yours look like? * 2 UPSes (one for networking one for compute + storage) * a JBOD with about 400TB raw in ZFS RAID10 * a little intertech case with a supermicro board running TrueNAS (that connects to the JBOD) * 3 to 6 NUCs depending on the usage, all running Talos, rook-ceph cluster on the NVMEs, all NUCs have a Sonnet Solo 10G Thunderbolt NIC * 10 Gig unifi networking and a UDM Pro * misc other stuff like a zima blade, a pikvm, shelves, fans, ISP modem, etc I'm not necessarily thinking about downsizing but the NUCs have been acting up and I've gotten tired of replacing them or their drives so I thought I'd maybe build a new machine to rule them all in terms of compute and if I only want one host then k8s starts making less sense. Mini PCs are fine if you don't push them to the brim like I do. I'm a professional k8s engineer I guess, so on the software side most of this comes naturally at this point.
- raybb 1y ago
  Did you come across or consider using coolify at any point? I've been using it for over a year and quite enjoyed it for it's Heroku type ease of use and auto deployments from GitHub. https://coolify.io/ https://coolify.io/
  - mirdaki 1y ago
    No I haven't heard of it before. I do like the idea though, especially for side projects. Thanks for sharing, I'll look more at it!
    - oulipo 1y ago
      Check out Dokploy too! https://dokploy.com/ https://dokploy.com/
      - _9y71 1y ago
        Their license is still ambiguous, and I don't like how they communicate with those who inquire about it.
- colordrops 1y ago
  Hi! Really excited by your work! I'm working on a similar project built on NixOS and curious what you thing. My goal is to have a small nearly zero-conf apple-device-like box that anyone can install by just plugging it into their modem then going through a web-based installation. It's still very nascent but I'm already running it at home. It is a hybrid router (think OPNSense/PFSense) + app server (nextcloud, synology, yunohost etc). All config is handled through a single Nix module. It automatically configures dynamic DNS, Letsencrypt TLS certs, and subdomains for each app. It's got built in ad blocking and headscale. I'm working on SSO at the moment. I'll take a look at your work and maybe steal some ideas. The project is currently self-hosted in my closet: https://homefree.host https://homefree.host
  - mirdaki 1y ago
    Oh that sounds really rad! Certainly could have it's use cases. I really appreciate how NixOS enables projects like this. Best of luck with it!
- ultra2d 1y ago
  Do you use encrypted ZFS? I have dabbled before with FreeIPA and other VMs on a Debian host with ZFS. For simplicity, I switched to running Seafile with encrypted libraries on a VPS and back that up to a local server via ZFS send/receive. That local server switches itself on every night, updates, syncs and then goes into sleep again. For additional resiliency, I'm thinking of switching to ZFS on Linux desktop (currently Fedora), fully encrypted except for Steam. Then sync that every hour or so to another drive in the same machine, and sync less frequently to a local server. Since the dataset is already encrypted, I can either sync to an external drive or some cloud service. Another reason to do it like this is that storing a full photo archive within Seafile on a VPS is too costly.
  - mirdaki 1y ago
    Yes! On top of the data safety features of ZFS, the fact you can encrypt a dataset and incremental send/receive is a fantastic ability
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  I appreciated the in depth look and while some ideas from your setup will take more time to implement, I just added flame for the dashboard and see how it fares with family.
  - mirdaki 1y ago
    Thank you! It's all a journey, hope flame works well for you!
tripdout 1y ago
Read the first paragraph and knew you were gonna talk about Nix.
- senectus1 1y ago
  I love the idea of nix... but i want ubuntu nix or fedora nix :-P It needs to be stupid easy and reliable.
  - mirdaki 1y ago
    I think that's a fair point. Kinda like with Arch, you do have to know what you want to setup NixOS right now I really like what's happening in the ublue space were folks are tweaking and optimizing distros for specific use cases (like bazzite for gaming) and then sharing them NixOS does support that to an extent, but it certainly doesn't have the same community movement behind it like those
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Lol, yeah. It was a journey to get to it, and a slightly shorter journey to feel comfortable with it, but it has won me over
dr_kiszonka 1y ago
I am curious what are some good enough cheapskate self-hosting setups? I want to self-host one of those floss Pocket replacements but I don't want to pay more than what these projects charge for hosting the software themselves (~$5). I am also considering self-hosting n8n. I don't have any sophisticated requirements. If it was possible I would host it from my phone with a backup to Google Drive.
- redrove 1y ago
  I would look up intel N100 mini PCs. Extremely low power and fast enough (it’s even got hardware decoding).
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - demaga 1y ago
    I built a NAS with N100 and am pretty happy with it. Price to performance is really good. It runs several services, no issues yet
    - redrove 1y ago
      Which board did you get?
      - demaga 1y ago
        ASUS PRIME N100I-D D4; put 16 GB of RAM in there, but that was probably an overkill
- qmr 1y ago
  Used NUCs, Raspberry Pi / pi zero. Any old PC with low idle power draw.
- solraph 1y ago
  Any of the 1L PCs from Dell, HP, or Lenovo. They sip power (5~10 watts), and take up minimal space. I've got a 6 or 7 VMs running on one, and it barely breaks 5% CPU usage. See https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... for a good list of reviews.
sgc 1y ago
How are you securing taris? Where is your local network firewall? Which one are you using? Why did you go with Nextcloud instead of using something more barebones, for example a restic server?
- mirdaki 1y ago
  This article (https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-2021-07-18/ https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-2021-07-18/) walks through a lot of the steps I've done on all my NixOS systems As for Nextcloud vs a restic server, Nextcloud is heavier, but I do benefit from it's extra features (like Calendar and Contact management) as well as use a couple of apps (Memories for photos is quite nice). Plus it's much more family friendly, which was a core requirement for my setup
  - sgc 1y ago
    As you said, everybody will have their own approach. For me, setting up a dedicated firewall to protect the soft underbelly of my less tech savvy family computers was the primary motivation for starting a home lab. I could not imagine a network architecture without it.
deleted 1y ago
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zer00eyz 1y ago
It's nice to see a home lab on HN. Hardware has become a lost art for many. If you dont have a home lab, start one. Grab a 1l pc off of ebay. Think center m720q or m920q with an i5 is a great place to start. It will cost you less than 200 bucks and if you want to turn it into a NAS or an Opnsense box later you can. When it arrives toss Proxmox on it and get your toys from the community scripts section... it will let you get set up on 'easy mode'. Fair warning, having a home lab is an addiction, and will change how you look at development if you get into it deeply.
- leovander 1y ago
  Not sure if it happens to most, but I have looped back around to not wanting to play sysadmin at home. Most of the stuff I have running I haven't updated in a awhile, luckily since I own it and it's all internal I don't need to worry about anyone taking away my locally hosted apps. Thank the IT gods for docker compose, and tools like portainer to minimize the amount of fuddling around I have to do.
  - __turbobrew__ 1y ago
    Same, replaced the ISP router with my own and have a single box which has storage and compute for running VMs and NFS and that is it. Last thing I want to be doing on a Friday night is debugging why my home network is broken.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    That, and I've learned the stuff I need to from my homelab. Earlier in my career, setting up a light version of a production network at home was hugely educational and I think it was a large part of why I'm a senior today. But now, I don't need to run all that at home unless I have specific learning objectives. So I keep my home network a lot simpler than it used to be, as a result.
- nathan_douglas 1y ago
  I credit homelabbing through my twenties with just about everything good that's happened to me in my career. I certainly didn't end up being moderately employable because I'm smart, charismatic, incisive, creative, lucky, educated, diligent, connected, handsome, sanitary, interesting, or thoughtful; no, it's because I have a tendency toward obsession, delusions of grandeur, and absolutely terrible impulse control. So I started buying junk on eBay and trying to connect it together and make it do things, and the more frustrated I got, the less able I was to think about literally anything else, and I'd spend all night poking around on Sourceforge or random phpBBs trying to get the damn things to compile or communicate or tftp boot or whatever I wanted them to do. The only problem was eventually I got good enough that I actually _could_ keep the thing running and my wife and kid and I started putting good stuff on my computers, like movies and TV shows and music and pictures and it started to actually be a big deal when I blew something up. Like, it wasn't just that I felt like a failure, but that I felt like a failure AND my kid couldn't watch Avatar and that's literally all he wanted to watch. So now I have two homelabs, one that keeps my family happy and one that's basically the Cato to my Clouseau, a sort of infrastructural nemesis that will just actually try to kill me. Y'know, for fulfillment.
jjangkke 1y ago
im using proxmox but struggling to setup subnets and vms should I be using terraform and ansible? im using cursor to ssh and it constantly needs to run commands to get "state" of the setup. basically im trying to do what I used to do on AWS: setup VMs on private network talking to each other with one gateway dedicated to internet connection but this is proving to be extremely difficult with the bash scripts generated by cursor if anyone can help me continue my journey with self hosting instead of relying on AWS that would be great
- sgc 1y ago
  > im using proxmox but struggling to setup subnets and vms That is a pretty broad target. I would say start by setting up an opnsense vm, from there you can do very little to start, just lock down your network so you can work in peace. But it can control your subnet traffic, host your tailscale, dchp server, and adguard home, etc. As somebody who was quite used to hosting my own servers, before I first set up my homelab I thought proxmox would be the heart of it. Actually opnsense is the heart of the network, proxmox is much more in the background. I think proxmox + opnsense is great tech and you should not be adding in terraform and ansible, but I am not sure that using cursor is helping you. You need a really good grasp of what is going on if your entire digital life is going to be controlled centrally. I would lean heavily on the proxmox tutorials and forums, and even more on the opnsense tutorials and forums. Using cursor for less important things afterwards, or to clarify a fine point every once in a while would make more sense.
- esseph 1y ago
  You don't need any scripts to do that. Read the docs! https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Network_Configuration#_choosing_a_network_configuration https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Network_Configuration#_choosing...
- redrove 1y ago
  I agree Proxmox default networking is lacking/insufficient at best. If you have VLANs or want to do LACP, anything more advanced than a simple interface you'll run into the limitations of the Proxmox implementation quite quickly. I think the networking experience for hosts is one of the worst things about Proxmox.
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
> Relatively easy for family and friends to use > This means keep one login per person, ideally with SSO, for as many services as I can Truly S-tier target. Incredible hard, incredible awesome. I've said for a long time that Linux & open source is kind of a paradox. It goes everywhere, it speaks every protocol. But as a client, as an end. The whole task of coordinating, of groupwareing, of bringing together networks: that's all much harder, much more to be defined. Making the many systems work together, having directory infrastructure: that stuff is amazing. For years I assumed that someday I'd be running FreeIPA or some Windows compatible directory service, but it sort of feels like maybe some OpenID type world might possibly be gel'ing into place.
- Abishek_Muthian 1y ago
  I completely agree with the paradox, just yesterday I posted how FOSS is not accessible to non-techies on my problem validation platform[1]. I've been thinking if a platform which connects techies to non-techies can help solve that, say like a systems integrator for individuals. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/484-foss-are-not-accessible-to-non-techies-opensource-techsupport https://needgap.com/problems/484-foss-are-not-accessible-to-...
  - udev4096 1y ago
    It's not supposed to be. You put in time, use your brain to understand the system. Even a non-techie can easily understand OIDC and Oauth2, it's not that hard
    - nativeit 1y ago
      This seems like a very naive perspective.
    - Thorrez 1y ago
      As a techie, experienced in security, reading the OIDC spec... there are definitely some things I don't understand in there. I'm not sure the authors even understand what's going on. On 2023-12-15 they published an update to OpenID Connect Core 1.0, called "errata set 2". Previously it said to verify an ID token in a token response, the client needs to > * If the ID Token contains multiple audiences, the Client SHOULD verify that an azp Claim is present. > * If an azp (authorized party) Claim is present, the Client SHOULD verify that its client_id is the Claim Value. The new version is quite different. Now it says > * If the implementation is using extensions (which are beyond the scope of this specification) that result in the azp (authorized party) Claim being present, it SHOULD validate the azp value as specified by those extensions. > * This validation MAY include that when an azp (authorized party) Claim is present, the Client SHOULD verify that its client_id is the Claim Value. So core parts of the security of the ID Token are being changed in errata updates. What was the old purpose of azp? What is the new purpose of azp? Hard to tell. Did all the OIDC implementations in existence change to follow the new errata update (which didn't update the version number)? I doubt it. https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231214085702/https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231214085702/https://openid.ne... Or how about a more fundamental question: Why does the ID Token have a signature? What attack does that signature prevent? What use cases does the signature allow? The spec doesn't explain that.
xyzzy123 1y ago
Sometimes when I think about my home network, I think about it in terms of what will happen when I die and what I will be inflicting on my family as the ridiculous setups stop working. Or like, how much it would cost a police forensics team to try to make any sense of it. I think "home labbing" fulfils much the same urge / need as the old guys (I hate to say it but very much mostly guys) met by creating hugely detailed scale model railways in their basement. I don't mean that in a particularly derogatory way, I just think some people have a deep need for pocket worlds they can control absolutely.
- udev4096 1y ago
  Curious about your setup. Is it extremely unmanageable or have you gone out of your way to make it so?
  - xyzzy123 1y ago
    Unifi network; small proxmox vms for core services; big truenas box for movies, storage, "apps ecosystem" stuff like minecraft servers; baremetal 12 node k8s cluster on opi5s for "research" (coz I do lots of k8s at work). Each "stage" above is like incremental failure domains, unifi only keeps internet working, core vms add functionality (like unifi mgmt, rancher, etc), truenas is for "fun extras" etc. k8s lab has nothing I need to keep on it because distributed storage operators are still kind of explodey. Like each part makes sense individually but when I look at the whole thing I start to question my mental health.
  - ffsm8 1y ago
    Let's explore the implied argument a lil: Imagine simplest possible deployment you've cooked up. Now imagine explaining your mother how to maintain it after you're dead and she needs to access the files on the service you setup. usually, selfhosting is not particularly hard. It's just conceptually way beyond what the average joe is able to do. (Not because they're not smart enough, but simply because they never learned to and will not learn now because they don't want to form that skill set. And I'm not hating on boomers, you can make the same argument with your hypothetical kids or spouse. The parents are just an easy placeholder because you're biologically required to have them, which isn't the case for any other familial relationship)
perelin 1y ago
Outside of the stated requirements because its not fully open source, but https://www.cloudron.io/ https://www.cloudron.io/ made all my self hosting pains go away.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Setup your own WireGuard rather than Tailscale.. this is too much like Authy delegating AAA to a third-party. - Store your SSH public keys and host keys in LDAP. - Use real Solaris ZFS that works well or stick with mdraid10+XFS, and/or use Ceph. ZoL bit me by creating unmountable volumes and offering zero support when their stuff borked. - Application-notified, quiesced backups to some other nearline box. - Do not give all things internet access. - Have a pair (or a few) bastion jumpboxes, preferably one of the BSDs like OpenBSD. WG and SSH+Yubikey as the only ways inside, both protected by SPA port knocking. - Divy up hardware with a type 1 hypervisor and run kubernetes inside guests in those. - Standardize as much as possible. - Use configuration and infrastructure management tools checked into git. If it ain't automated, it's just a big ball of mud no one know how to recreate. - Have extra infrastructure capacity for testing and failure hot replacements.
- udev4096 1y ago
  How can one run vanilla wireguard and leverage features offered by headscale? At minimum, a bunch of bash scripts would do the exact same thing, if not worse
  - burnt-resistor 1y ago
    Don't do it with bash. You can at least use Ruby, Python to make an API for it, or use configuration management. They really didn't think about being (local) runtime configurable for the dev/ops UX being too ultra *NIX purist with single file plain text configuration. At least it could have a plain text watch directory like daemontools for dynamic reconfiguration.
    - udev4096 1y ago
      Headscale already has a clean API in go, why recreate the wheel? For fun, sure but production use, I am gonna stick with it
- OptionOfT 1y ago
  Annoying thing about WireGuard is their outdated and buggy iOS client. When you set up a dns with A and AAAA it'll prefer the A address, even when you're on a 646xlat network, so now that connection is proxied and will time out after a while.
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
Why people need these overly complicated setups and why do they need to have an access point to reach their "den" from anywhere is beyond me. People and their digital gadget delusion. Security paranoia, but here are the details of my home lab. WHY? If god forbid someone gets in they could in an instant identify the target...
dedge 1y ago
IMO this is too complicated. I think products like the Synology Disk Station strike a better balance between ownership of data and maintenance over time. Tailscale even publishes a client for Synology products.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Everyone will have different goals and preferences. For instance, my dad just wanted a way to backup and remotely access some files, so we got him a Synology NAS. It's great for it's target users and if you're one of them, awesome! I just don't like the lock-in that you get Synology. Plus I do enjoy tinkering with these things, so I wanted to put together something that balances usability, complexity while minimizing that lock-in
- deanc 1y ago
  Is this the same Synology that a few years ago numerous people had their boxes ransomwared when they were open to the public internet. Synology continues to be shit value for the tools you get and as much as I want the convenience of ready to go software and hardware they cannot be relied on.
  - hum3hum3 1y ago
    I am thinking about replacing my Synology BUT I have had three and now ECC over the last 20 years and they have done their job faullessly. There are stupid things now like complaining about non Synology ram modules.
    - deanc 1y ago
      The latest news I heard is DSM complaining about non Synology hard drives too.
jancsika 1y ago
Is there home lab for isolated LAN and "self-sufficient" devices? I want to have a block of gunk on the LAN, and to connect devices to the LAN and be able to seamlessly copy that block to them. Bonus: any gunk I bring home gets added to the block. First part works with navidrome: I just connect through the LAN to my phone with amperfy and check the box to cache the songs. Now my song gunk is sync'd to the phone before I leave home. This obviously would fit a different mindset. Author has a setup optimized for maximum conceivable gunk, whereas mine would need to be limited to the maximum gunk you'd want to have on the smallest device. (But I do like that constraint.)
sandreas 1y ago
Nice writeup, thank you. I already thought about having NixOS on my server, but currently I prefer proxmox. There are projects with NixOS + Proxmox, but I did not test it yet. > My main storage setup is pretty simple. It a ZFS pool with four 10TB hard drives in a RAIDZ2 data vdev with an additional 256GB SDD as a cache vdev. That means two hard drives can die without me loosing that data. That gives me ~19TB of usable storage, which I’m currently using less than 10% of. Leaving plenty of room to grow. I would question this when buying a new system and not having a bunch of disks laying around... having a RAID-Z2 with four 10GB disks offers the same space as a RAID1 with two 20GB disks. Since you don't need the space NOW, you could even go RAID1 with two 10TB disks and grow it by replacing it with two 20TB as soon as you need more. This in my opinion would be more cost effective, since you only need to replace 2 disks instead of 4 to grow. This would take less time and since prices per TB are probably getting lower over time, it could also save you a ton of money. I would also say that the ability of losing 2 disks won't save you from having a backup somewhere...
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Oh yeah, I don't think the way I went about it was necessarily the most cost effective. I bought half of them on sale one year, didn't get around to setting things up, then bought the other two a year later on another sale once I finally got my server put together. I got them before I had my current plan in place. At one point I thought about having more services in a Kubernets cluster or something, but dropped that idea Also agree, RAID isn't a replacement for a backup. I have all my important data on my desktop and laptop with plans for a dedicated backup server in the future. RAID does give you more breathing room if things go wrong, and I decided that was worth it
  - sandreas 1y ago
    I went through the same situation and noticed that modern hard drives are big enough for fitting RAID1 into nearly every homelab use case except high-res Video footage (including a bluray movie collection) Two drives are easy to replace, easy to spare, consume less power and are quieter than 4+. The only advantage i See in raid5/6 is on 25Tb of storage requirement within 3 years.
chippyhendrix 1y ago
[flagged]
meehai 1y ago
Mine is much more barebone: - one single machine - nginx proxy - many services on the same machine; some are internal, some are supposed to be public, are all accessible via the web! - internal ones have a humongous large password for HTTP basic auth that I store in an external password manager (firefox built in one) - public ones are either public or have google oauth I coded all of them from scratch as that's the point of what I'm doing with homelabbing. You want images? browsers can read them. Videos? Browsers can play them. The hard part is the backend for me. The frontend is very much "90s html".
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Nice! I have a friend who is starting to program his infrastructure/services from scratch. It's a neat way to learn and make things fit well for your own needs
- qmr 1y ago
  HTTP sends password in cleartext. Better to use a self signed certificate at least.
Aeolun 1y ago
I’ve got to appreciate putting the matrix server on Coruscant if nothing else :)
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Thank you! The naming add a little bit of extra fun to it
irusensei 1y ago
> Authelia provides authentication and authorization for services in a couple of ways. For services that support OpenID Connect it provides a very simple single sign on experience. If not, Authelia can integrate with my reverse proxy (nginx) and require the user login before the reverse proxy allows access to a service. Recently I found out Gitea or Forgejo can act as an Oauth provider. And since these support ldap you can for example deploy a Samba AD and set it up as an authentication source for Gitea/Forgejo. If you enable the OAuth feature you can connect stuff like grafana and log in with your Samba AD credentials. To me this is more convenient than running a dedicated auth service considering Forgejo can also provide git, wiki, docker registry (also authenticated) and other function. It's such an underrated piece of software and uses so few resources.
noncoml 1y ago
What’s the power consumption?
- mirdaki 1y ago
  That is a great question I don't actually know the answer to. I need to grab something to track it
denkmoon 1y ago
I woke up today with a plan of making my DNS at a separate site work properly with ipv6, over my wireguard. I use ULAs for the point to point wireguard link, and GUAs don't like routing to ULAs. I figured the choice was between routing my two sites GUAs over the wireguard when talking to each other, or deploy ULAs in my networks. 4hrs later I had everything set up with ULAs. Had lunch. Decided that was awful. 3hrs after that I've got my GUAs going over the wireguard. Homelabbing is fun :')
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Yes it is, rock on!
dakiol 1y ago
I like it. Why Flame, though? It’s built using node, react, redux… meaning you are bringing dozens (if not hundreds) of third party dependencies to your secure kingdom. I don’t think it’s worth it for the start page (could easily be a single html page with hardcoded links)
- mirdaki 1y ago
  It's entirely because I've used it before. I just wanted something familiar to solve a problem quickly. I also think it looks nice. I'm not too worried about the security implications, since it is behind Tailscale and Authelia. I'm not committed to it, and do want to explore other options in the future
mmcnl 1y ago
I too use LLDAP and Authelia. I use Caddy (no Traefik) as a reverse proxy to protect my services using 2FA SSO. It's very easy to use and I can access all my services anywhere in the world without bothering with a VPN.
qiine 1y ago
Very interesting write-up! At this rate if I keep seeing good article about NixOS I might actually switch for real haha!
fariszr 1y ago
Great blog post, but unfortunately from my experience with my kinda tech-friendly family, i can tell you that not exposing service publicly is an absolute UX killer. Nobody uses the local nextcloud because they just don't think they can rely on it, it doesn't always work from their perspective, and is too finicky to use, because it needs an external app (Tailscale). This can be only fixed when the app itself can trigger a vpn connection, and I don't think this is going to happen any time soon.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  I do have to sit down and walk folks through setting up Tailscale, Nextcloud, etc on their devices. So far though, I haven't had any complaints once that is done. Nextcloud just syncs in the background and they can navigate to sites like normal. But my family is probably more tech literate than most, so that helps
  - fariszr 1y ago
    Yeah but that means they have to be aware of the need to activate tailscale on their phones manually everytime they want to use your apps. On PC I agree, you can just leave it running, on mobile though it chews through the battery like it's nothing.
- zbentley 1y ago
  An easy solve for this is to buy public domains for the sites you want to use, run a static website on them that says “turn on tailscale to access this site, set that up here (link to download a client preconfigured for my tailnet, invite only of course)”, then use tailscale DNS overrides to set up CNAMEs for that public DNS’s (sub)domains which point to the tailnet internal service domains.
  - fariszr 1y ago
    This would work if they didn't use the apps, which in the case of nextcloud they do.
  - fariszr 1y ago
nicomt 1y ago
It's not open-source or self-hosted but putting it out there: CloudFlare zero-trust is amazing and free. In my setup, I have a cloudflared tunnel configured in my homelab machine and I expose individual services without a VPN or opening up my firewall. You can also set up authentication with SSO, and it happens before reaching the backend application which makes it more secure. This is easy for family and friends to use, because they don't need to setup anything from their side, just go to the URL and login. https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...
- cromka 1y ago
  I seriously don’t understand why would people choose this over not exposing anything at all, except for Wireguard port. I have my client to automatically connect my home LAN when I’m not on WiFi and get access to all my self-hosted services without risking anything. You rely on third party solution which may or may not be made to government agencies. You also need to trust they Cloudflare doesn’t make mistakes, either. Also, how do you configure Cloudflare for a road warrior setup? How do you track ever changing dynamic IPs? As mentioned, all I need is a Wireguard client and I’m golden.
  - nicomt 1y ago
    > You rely on third party solution which may or may not be made to government agencies. That's a fair point, but for my use case, I feel comfortable enough with CloudFlare given the trade-offs. > You also need to trust they Cloudflare doesn’t make mistakes, either. I think the chances of CloudFlare making a mistake are much lower than me or any other individual Developer. > Cloudflare for a road warrior setup? How do you track ever changing dynamic IPs? I think you need to read the docs. All of that works without any extra config when using tunnels.
- javier2 1y ago
  CloudFlare zero-trust is very good, but i thought you need to have Cloudflare as man-in-the-middle on your domain to have this authentication flow work? ie. the TLS certs needs to live with Cloudflare.
nitnelave 1y ago
LDAP author here. I'm happy that LLDAP is mentioned and yet that it is not highlighted. The goal of the project was to have a simple LDAP server that is easy to install/manage for self-hosters without knowledge of LDAP required. Cheers and congrats on your setup!
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Thank you for the work and the kind words! I've had a great experience with LLDAP. Really appreciate it
threemux 1y ago
I don't have a very complex setup but I've been super happy with gokrazy for my rpis: https://gokrazy.org/ https://gokrazy.org/ OS upgrades are easy now and it's declarative but I don't have to learn Nix
- hum3hum3 1y ago
  Me too. It works really well now that I have a silent version with SSD and passive heat sink. This avoids my son turning it off because the fan noise annoys him. I am thinking about adding kubernetes for failure resilience but that is a work in progress. I am happy to start digging into Authelia. Are you using the gokrazy router as well?
  - threemux 1y ago
    I'm not using the router, but I do like reading about Stapelberg's quest for ridiculous home Internet speeds! I make do with standard gigabit fiber haha
piyuv 1y ago
Excellent write up. Can I ask why did you choose headscale instead of WireGuard?
- mirdaki 1y ago
  I found the Tailscale client experience is quite nice and headscale had built in OIDC support (so easy auth for my users) If I started this setup later I might have also used pangolin, which also provides a nice management interface on top of WireGuard https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
evnix 1y ago
I wish I had the time to do any of this. I could probably do it on a weekend but maintaining it, upgrading it to keep up with new releases would be something I wouldn't have time for. I end up just paying a cloud provider and forget about it. Anyone else on the same boat? What has been your approach?
- SomeoneOnTheWeb 1y ago
  Honestly, I self-host about a dozen services and upgrades take me less than a minute per month usually. I simply have one folder per service, each folder contains a docker-compose stack and a storage directory. Updating is simply a matter of running `docker compose pull` and `docker compose up -d`. Nothing more. Breaking updates requiring to tweak the config are very uncommon, and even when they happen it's only a few minutes of checking the updated config and applying it. IMO this is the simplest way to self-host. No VM, no complex software install, nothing more than a simple Docker Compose setup that's fully automated.
  - doubled112 1y ago
    That sounds similar to my setup, but each folder is a btrfs subvolume and my update script takes a snapshot before updating. I keep the Docker compose file together with the volumes in that subvolume. If something breaks I can decide to figure out why, or revert.
- beala 1y ago
  It's usually not a single weekend. If you're like me, it starts out with thinking it'd be nice to install Plex on an old gaming PC. A year later, it has organically grown into a rube goldberg machine of proxmox and home automation. Which I guess just reinforces your point. Joking aside, a minimal setup just using docker compose is pretty manageable. Self hosting many projects is as easy as 'docker compose up -d', and upgrades are straightforward as others have pointed out.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  With previous setups, I was certainly guilt of not upgrading and doing the maintenance needed. That's one reason why I like using NixOS and ZFS. Both provide really easy rollback options. So all I need to do is run an update and rebuild. If things work, no more for me to do. If things don't, I can try debugging or just revert back to the previous release till I have time to But also I think using a cloud provider is fine if you're happy with the experience. It is a time sink to get things setup and it's not zero maintenance time. It's reasonable to weight those costs
codethief 1y ago
> Here is a diagram of where I’ve ended up: In case the author is around: On mobile (Chrome on Android) the screenshot is not readable at all and there is also no way to open an enlarged version, let alone zoom into the page.
- aembleton 1y ago
  Same on Firefox. Here's the diagram as a zoomable image https://codecaptured.com/blog/images/ultimate-self-hosting/diagram.png https://codecaptured.com/blog/images/ultimate-self-hosting/d...
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Oh thanks for pointing it out! I've updated it so clicking on the diagram opens it up directly
djhworld 1y ago
I've been tempted to use NixOS for my self hosted setup but I just can't bring myself to do it. My setup is quite simple, it's just a few VMs with one docker compose file for each. I have an ansible playbook that copies the docker compose files across and that's it. There's really nothing more to it then that, and maintenance is just upgrading the OS (Fedora Server) once the version reaches EOL. I tend to stay 1 version behind the release cycle so upgrade whenever that gets bumped. I do use nix-darwin on my macs so I do _see_ the value of using a nix configuration, but I find it difficult to see if the effort in porting my setup to Nix is worth it in the long run, configuration files don't get written in a short time. Maybe LLMs could speed this up, but I just don't have it in me right now to make that leap
- Havoc 1y ago
  Explored it a bit, but found the incremental gain to be not massive if you're already using IaC of some sort
- entropie 1y ago
  > I've been tempted to use NixOS for my self hosted setup but I just can't bring myself to do it. I recently tried nixos and after spending a week trying it out, I switched my home network and 2 production servers to nixos. It has been running as expected for 3,4 months now and I LOVE it. Migrating the servers was way easier than the workstations. My homeserver was setup in a few hours. I also recently bought a jetson orin nano to play and learn on and I set up nixos with jetpack-nixos there too. I know with gentoo this would have been a (much) more painful process. I have used gentoo for over 20 years and have always felt very much at home. What annoyed me was that the compile times on older computers were simply unbearable. Compiling GHC on my 2019 dell xps just takes 6 hours or something like that.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  The big difference for me was NixOS provides really simple rollbacks if something goes wrong, where with Ansible and compose files, that's possible, but you have to do it yourself But also if you're setup is working for you, I think that's great! It sounds like you have a good system in place
beala 1y ago
A pain point you mention is that everyone must run the tailscale client. Have you considered exposing everything on the public internet using something like Cloudflare Tunnels? You can have cloudflare handle auth on their edge network, which mitigates the worry about having to deal with 0-days on a self hosted auth solution. You have a pretty sophisticated directory setup tho so I'm not sure how well this would fit in with the existing infra.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  It is something I considered. Ultimately I didn't want to depend on Clouflare (or any other provider) for something as core to my setup as my remote access But it's a totally valid option, just not one that fit with my preferences
master_crab 1y ago
Why bother with SSO? If your family and closest friends use something like a wireguard client (iOS for example has a very good one that takes only a minute to configure permanently), the users simply switch a toggle and they are now on your private network and don’t need to SSO to anything (provided you have left everything open). For a small home network the pros of that approach vastly exceed the cons.
- haswell 1y ago
  I self host about 20 separate apps. I’m in the middle of an SSO implementation project because I do not want to continue managing credentials for 20 separate apps. I’ve considered opening some of these apps to family members, and having one place to deal with any auth issues is a high priority for me. I can’t agree with your conclusion.
  - master_crab 1y ago
    That’s ok. But step back further. Do you need to fine grain permission people on the majority of those apps? If you don’t, then SSO is more of a pain than it’s worth. Simply control the network access and leave the apps alone.
    - haswell 1y ago
      How are you defining fine grained permissions? All I care about is having separate accounts for each person who will log in, even if I’m the only person. I again can’t agree with your conclusion that this is more pain than it’s worth. But it’s possible we just have different priorities.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  The services we use, like Nextcloud or Mealie, are designed for folks to have their own user accounts. SSO means they can use the same login across all of them without me having to manage that for them (and also avoids me having to know their passwords). It does complicated the setup, but not the operation, and that makes it more likely folks will use the services
stephenlf 1y ago
Great read. Thanks for sharing.
grep_name 1y ago
This is kinda similar to something I'm trying to setup. I have most of my self-hosted infrastructure running in docker containers, but I want to put some stuff on a nixOS ec2 instance. Mostly services I want to never go down or be affected by my local network (uptime kuma) and chat stuff (irc bouncer, conduit, soju, etc etc). I use nixOS on my laptop but don't make many nix projects, and TBH I have no idea how to test this setup locally before deploying it. I have some nix stuff setup that spins up a VM and exposes the ports on localhost, but it's brittle and rapidly spaghettifying. Do you have any tips for testing this stuff as part of a local project?
- mirdaki 1y ago
  I've done two kinds of testing On my NixOS laptop I you can setup services I'm interested in trying, but just run them locally. So I don't setup things like SSL (you can, it sometimes just makes getting a new SSL cert for that same domain take some time). I just update my /etc/hosts to the local IP and can give that a go For trying out the more complicated setup parts, like SSL, Tailscale, etc, I created a NixOS VM that I setup the same way I wanted for my "production" use case. Once I have the config file the way I wanted, it's as simple as moving it to my non test VM (baring previous mentioned SSL issues). And I only tested one part at a time, adding them together as I went But also, one of the great things about NixOS is it's really easy to incrementally try things and rollback. Once I got the skeleton of the setup working, I've mostly done my testing on my "production" server without issue
weitendorf 1y ago
I have been getting into this too. I caution anybody with self-hosting/tinkering tendencies against starting a tech company because it just makes it so much easier to justify this stuff... Eventually serving a regular old container doesn't cut it anymore and you find yourself needing to pay these weird newspapers nobody reads to publish your business' alias because it's a requirement for a legal DBA which ASIN needs to let you get your own IPV6 block, which you need to truly own you and your customers' IPs and it's not worth becoming an AS without it, but then you can actually move towards physically become your own ISP and then... The ingress problem people solve with tailscale is one of the hardest. I'm curious to see if it's possible to implement STUN/TURN [0-1] with a generally good mechanism for exposing the server to the Internet by caching all static files and blocking dynamic access to the backend with a loginwall, which authenticates allowed users with email "magic links" -> nonrenewable access tokens. In theory it should not be excessively difficult, expensive, or risky to do this. It's just relevant enough to what we're doing with remote development environments for me to justify another rabbit hole [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relays_around_NAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relays_around_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN
- zrail 1y ago
  I have ingress set up with Fly.io. Simple caching nginx config on the remote end with a Fly Wireguard peer set up as an extra container in the appropriate ingress pod. It's not free but it's the least expensive way I can find to get anycast ingress and not expose any ports to the internet from my homelab.
sylens 1y ago
Great write-up. I have been tinkering with Immich over the last few months and go back and forth whether I want to just limit it to Tailscale for use away from home or if I want to go through the trouble of setting up a reverse proxy on a VPS. I think my biggest concern is finding a relatively user-friendly monitoring/security solution to alert me if anybody is trying some sort of attack against the VPS
- clueless 1y ago
  that's a great concern as I'm in the same boat. What have you find with regards to the monitoring/security solution?
- th0rgall 1y ago
  I've learned to live with having WireGuard/Tailscale on all the time on my own devices. But for giving (extended) family & friends access to shared albums with Immich, it's too impractical to configure and explain widely. I've been using a Cloudflare Tunnel for this situation with their "Zero Trust" email-based authentication. It probably won't work with the Immich mobile app though, since I doubt that client can handle Cloudflare's interstitial login screen.
  - sylens 1y ago
    You can setup Google oauth authentication on Cloudflare zero trust and pass that right through to Immich’s support for Oauth for a pretty seamless experience
xyst 1y ago
It’s a shame he doesn’t self host an internal mail server at least with restricted outbound/smtp. Something like this is very easy to setup with projects such as stalwart which also offers CardDAV and CardDAV (think easy synchronization of calendar and contacts without relying on "cloud"). He already has tailscale + headscale, adding in an internal only mail/collaboration server would be a win.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Hey, I ruled out a mail server for external, since I've heard many people have issues with other providers (Gmail, Outlook, etc) randomly blocking email. Didn't feel I could rely on it Having an internal only mail server for notifications is an interesting idea. I've been using ntfy and Matrix to achieve something like that, but not all services support those notification methods. I'll keep that in mind!
ukanwat 1y ago
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ctkhn 1y ago
Curious what the driver for nixos and packages over docker was. Docker was the huge step up for me in making the homelab easy to run, update, and recover when things failed. It also made managing services endpoints and ports remote easier than when they all lived on the operating system. Wish this was delved into a little more in the post.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  I can touch on it more. Docker and compose files are great for getting things going, contained, and keeping everything declarative But I found the more services I used with Docker, the more time it took to update. I didn't want to just update to latest, I wanted to update to specific version, for better rollback. That meant manually checking and updating every single service, bringing each file down, and then back up. It's not entirely unmanageable, but it became enough friction I wasn't updating things consistently. And yes, I could have automated some of that, but never got around to it NixOS, in addition to the things I mention in the post, is just a two step process to update everything (`nix flake update` and `nixos-rebuild`). That makes updating my OS and every package/service super easy. And provides built in rollback if it fails. Plus I can configure things like my firewall and other security things in NixOS with the same config I do everything else Also, Nix packages/services provides a lot of the "containerization" benefits. It's reproducible. It doesn't have dependency problems (see this for morehttps://nixos.org/guides/how-nix-works/ https://nixos.org/guides/how-nix-works/). And most services use separate users with distinct permissions, giving pretty good security. It's not that Docker can't do those things. It's that Nix does those things in a way that work really well with how I think
sn0n 1y ago
> general approach, lists nixos first *Leaves page* can't do it...
jstrebel 1y ago
Impressive setup, but I would assume it to be very operations-intensive because of the high number of deployed components and their complex configuration. Plus, if you are serious about self-hosting, you would need the facilities and infrastructure to deploy it: server rack, redundant power supply, smoke detectors, fire extinguisher... I would never let my PC-grade hardware run unsupervised in my home. And if I understood correctly, you would still have to have some server on the Internet for running your Headscale VPN, so you need your own dedicated Internet connection - ADSL, dial-up, cable modem would not be enough.
jc__denton 1y ago
Never understood the obsession with Tailscale. I've got an on-demand WireGuard VPN back into my home network with both split (DNS and local service access) and full tunnels. I externally host more prominent things on a VPS and have a tunnel back in for the few services I do want to expose. A mesh VPN just seems like another potential vector into my LAN and Yet Another Subscription in a time when I'm trying to cutback costs on subscription services.

612 points by mirdaki 1y ago

Hey y'all, I know getting a setup that feels "right" can be a process. We all have different goals, tech preferences, etc. I wanted to a share my blog post walking through how I finally built a setup that I can just be happy with and use. It goes over my goals, requirements, tech choices, layout, and some specific problems I've resolved. Where I've landed of course isn't where everyone else will, but I hope it can serve as a good reference. I’ve really benefited from the content and software folks have freely shared, and hope I can continue that and help others.

redrove 1y ago
How are you finding Nix for the homelab to be? Every time I try it I just end up confused, maybe next time will be the charm. The reason I ask is I homelab “hardcore”; i.e. I have a 25U rack and I run a small Kubernetes cluster and ceph via Talos Linux. Due to various reasons, including me running k8s in the lab for about 7 years now, I’ve been itching to change and consolidate and simplify, and every time i think about my requirements I somehow end up where you did: Nix and ZFS. All those services and problems are very very familiar to me, feel free to ask me questions back btw.
- MisterKent 1y ago
  I've been trying to switch my home cluster from Debian + K3s to Talos but keep running into issues. What does your persistent storage layer look like on Talos? How have you found it's hardware stability over the long term?
  - esseph 1y ago
    Talos is the Linux kernel at heart, so.. just fine.
  - redrove 1y ago
    >What does your persistent storage layer look like on Talos? Well, for its own storage: it's an immutable OS that you can configure via a single YAML file, it automatically provisions appropriate partitions for you, or you can even install the ZFS extension and have it use ZFS (no zfs on root though). For application/data storage there's a myriad of options to choose from[0]; after going back and forth a few times years ago with Longhorn and other solutions, I ended up at rook-ceph for PVCs and I've been using it for many years without any issues. If you don't have 10gig networking you can even do iSCSI from another host (or nvmeof via democratic-csi but that's quite esoteric). >How have you found it's hardware stability over the long term? It's Linux so pretty good! No complaints and everything just works. If something is down it's always me misconfiguring or a hardware failure. [0] https://www.talos.dev/v1.11/kubernetes-guides/configuration/storage/#storage-clusters https://www.talos.dev/v1.11/kubernetes-guides/configuration/...
    - avtar 1y ago
      > after going back and forth a few times years ago with Longhorn and other solutions, I ended up at rook-ceph for PVCs Curious to know what issues you ran into with Longhorn.
      - redrove 1y ago
        It was years ago but I recall high CPU usage being an issue in particular. In general it's just not as battle tested as ceph and I needed something more bulletproof. However I will say this: I'm sure that issue with the CPU usage was fixed (I was watching the GitHub issue) and you might not need your distributed FS to be CERN ready for your lab; AND the UI and built-in backups Longhorn offers are great for beginners so I'd suggest giving it a try if you don't already know you want ceph or OpenEBS Mayastor for the performance and so on.
        avtar 1y ago
        Thanks! I haven’t had to implement replicated storage (still using EFS) but I was curious about Longhorn.
- udev4096 1y ago
  Honestly, I personally like the combination of keepalived+docker(swarm if needed)+rsync for syncing config files. keepalived uses VRRP, which creates a floating IP. It's extremely lightweight and works like a charm. You won't even notice the downtime, the switch to another server IP is instant
  - cess11 1y ago
    Keepalived is great. Learning about it was one of the best things I got from building HA-aiming infra at a job once.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  I certainly didn't take to Nix the first few times I looked at it. The language itself is unusual and the error messages leave much to be desired. And the split around Flakes just complicates things further (though I do recommend using them, once you set it up, it's simple and the added reproducibility gives nice peace of mind) But once I fully understood how it's features really make it easy for you to recover from mistakes and how useful the package options available from nixpkgs are, I decided it was time to sink in and figure it out. Looking at other folks nix config on GitHub (especially for specific services you're wanting to use) is incredibly helpful (mine is also linked in the post) I certainly don't consider myself to be a nix expert, but the nice thing is you can do most things by using other examples and modifying them till you feel good about it. Then overtime you just get more familiar with and just grow your skill Oh man, having a 25U rack sounds really fun. I have a moderate size cabinet I keep my server, desktop, a UPS, 10Gig switch, and my little fanless Home Assistant box. What's yours look like? I should add it to the article, but one of my anti-requirements was anything in the realm of high availability. It's neat tech to play with, but I can deal with downtime for most things if the trade off is everything being much simpler. I've played a little bit with Kubernetes at work, but that is a whole ecosystem I've yet to tackle
  - redrove 1y ago
    >The language itself is unusual and the error messages leave much to be desired. And the split around Flakes just complicates things further Those are my chief complaints as well, actually. I never quite got to the point where I grasped how all the bits fit together. I understand the DSL (though the errors are cryptic as you said) and the flakes seemed recommended by everyone yet felt like an addon that was forgotten about (you needed to turn them on through some experimental flag IIRC?). I'll give it another shot some day, maybe it'll finally make sense. >Oh man, having a 25U rack sounds really fun. I have a moderate size cabinet I keep my server, desktop, a UPS, 10Gig switch, and my little fanless Home Assistant box. What's yours look like? * 2 UPSes (one for networking one for compute + storage) * a JBOD with about 400TB raw in ZFS RAID10 * a little intertech case with a supermicro board running TrueNAS (that connects to the JBOD) * 3 to 6 NUCs depending on the usage, all running Talos, rook-ceph cluster on the NVMEs, all NUCs have a Sonnet Solo 10G Thunderbolt NIC * 10 Gig unifi networking and a UDM Pro * misc other stuff like a zima blade, a pikvm, shelves, fans, ISP modem, etc I'm not necessarily thinking about downsizing but the NUCs have been acting up and I've gotten tired of replacing them or their drives so I thought I'd maybe build a new machine to rule them all in terms of compute and if I only want one host then k8s starts making less sense. Mini PCs are fine if you don't push them to the brim like I do. I'm a professional k8s engineer I guess, so on the software side most of this comes naturally at this point.
raybb 1y ago
Did you come across or consider using coolify at any point? I've been using it for over a year and quite enjoyed it for it's Heroku type ease of use and auto deployments from GitHub. https://coolify.io/ https://coolify.io/
- mirdaki 1y ago
  No I haven't heard of it before. I do like the idea though, especially for side projects. Thanks for sharing, I'll look more at it!
  - oulipo 1y ago
    Check out Dokploy too! https://dokploy.com/ https://dokploy.com/
    - _9y71 1y ago
      Their license is still ambiguous, and I don't like how they communicate with those who inquire about it.
colordrops 1y ago
Hi! Really excited by your work! I'm working on a similar project built on NixOS and curious what you thing. My goal is to have a small nearly zero-conf apple-device-like box that anyone can install by just plugging it into their modem then going through a web-based installation. It's still very nascent but I'm already running it at home. It is a hybrid router (think OPNSense/PFSense) + app server (nextcloud, synology, yunohost etc). All config is handled through a single Nix module. It automatically configures dynamic DNS, Letsencrypt TLS certs, and subdomains for each app. It's got built in ad blocking and headscale. I'm working on SSO at the moment. I'll take a look at your work and maybe steal some ideas. The project is currently self-hosted in my closet: https://homefree.host https://homefree.host
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Oh that sounds really rad! Certainly could have it's use cases. I really appreciate how NixOS enables projects like this. Best of luck with it!
ultra2d 1y ago
Do you use encrypted ZFS? I have dabbled before with FreeIPA and other VMs on a Debian host with ZFS. For simplicity, I switched to running Seafile with encrypted libraries on a VPS and back that up to a local server via ZFS send/receive. That local server switches itself on every night, updates, syncs and then goes into sleep again. For additional resiliency, I'm thinking of switching to ZFS on Linux desktop (currently Fedora), fully encrypted except for Steam. Then sync that every hour or so to another drive in the same machine, and sync less frequently to a local server. Since the dataset is already encrypted, I can either sync to an external drive or some cloud service. Another reason to do it like this is that storing a full photo archive within Seafile on a VPS is too costly.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Yes! On top of the data safety features of ZFS, the fact you can encrypt a dataset and incremental send/receive is a fantastic ability
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
I appreciated the in depth look and while some ideas from your setup will take more time to implement, I just added flame for the dashboard and see how it fares with family.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  Thank you! It's all a journey, hope flame works well for you!

tripdout 1y ago

Read the first paragraph and knew you were gonna talk about Nix.

senectus1 1y ago
I love the idea of nix... but i want ubuntu nix or fedora nix :-P It needs to be stupid easy and reliable.
- mirdaki 1y ago
  I think that's a fair point. Kinda like with Arch, you do have to know what you want to setup NixOS right now I really like what's happening in the ublue space were folks are tweaking and optimizing distros for specific use cases (like bazzite for gaming) and then sharing them NixOS does support that to an extent, but it certainly doesn't have the same community movement behind it like those
mirdaki 1y ago
Lol, yeah. It was a journey to get to it, and a slightly shorter journey to feel comfortable with it, but it has won me over

dr_kiszonka 1y ago

I am curious what are some good enough cheapskate self-hosting setups? I want to self-host one of those floss Pocket replacements but I don't want to pay more than what these projects charge for hosting the software themselves (~$5). I am also considering self-hosting n8n. I don't have any sophisticated requirements. If it was possible I would host it from my phone with a backup to Google Drive.

redrove 1y ago
I would look up intel N100 mini PCs. Extremely low power and fast enough (it’s even got hardware decoding).
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- demaga 1y ago
  I built a NAS with N100 and am pretty happy with it. Price to performance is really good. It runs several services, no issues yet
  - redrove 1y ago
    Which board did you get?
    - demaga 1y ago
      ASUS PRIME N100I-D D4; put 16 GB of RAM in there, but that was probably an overkill
qmr 1y ago
Used NUCs, Raspberry Pi / pi zero. Any old PC with low idle power draw.
solraph 1y ago
Any of the 1L PCs from Dell, HP, or Lenovo. They sip power (5~10 watts), and take up minimal space. I've got a 6 or 7 VMs running on one, and it barely breaks 5% CPU usage. See https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/ https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimic... for a good list of reviews.

sgc 1y ago

How are you securing taris? Where is your local network firewall? Which one are you using? Why did you go with Nextcloud instead of using something more barebones, for example a restic server?

mirdaki 1y ago
This article (https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-2021-07-18/ https://xeiaso.net/blog/paranoid-nixos-2021-07-18/) walks through a lot of the steps I've done on all my NixOS systems As for Nextcloud vs a restic server, Nextcloud is heavier, but I do benefit from it's extra features (like Calendar and Contact management) as well as use a couple of apps (Memories for photos is quite nice). Plus it's much more family friendly, which was a core requirement for my setup
- sgc 1y ago
  As you said, everybody will have their own approach. For me, setting up a dedicated firewall to protect the soft underbelly of my less tech savvy family computers was the primary motivation for starting a home lab. I could not imagine a network architecture without it.

deleted 1y ago

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zer00eyz 1y ago

It's nice to see a home lab on HN. Hardware has become a lost art for many. If you dont have a home lab, start one. Grab a 1l pc off of ebay. Think center m720q or m920q with an i5 is a great place to start. It will cost you less than 200 bucks and if you want to turn it into a NAS or an Opnsense box later you can. When it arrives toss Proxmox on it and get your toys from the community scripts section... it will let you get set up on 'easy mode'. Fair warning, having a home lab is an addiction, and will change how you look at development if you get into it deeply.

leovander 1y ago
Not sure if it happens to most, but I have looped back around to not wanting to play sysadmin at home. Most of the stuff I have running I haven't updated in a awhile, luckily since I own it and it's all internal I don't need to worry about anyone taking away my locally hosted apps. Thank the IT gods for docker compose, and tools like portainer to minimize the amount of fuddling around I have to do.
- __turbobrew__ 1y ago
  Same, replaced the ISP router with my own and have a single box which has storage and compute for running VMs and NFS and that is it. Last thing I want to be doing on a Friday night is debugging why my home network is broken.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  That, and I've learned the stuff I need to from my homelab. Earlier in my career, setting up a light version of a production network at home was hugely educational and I think it was a large part of why I'm a senior today. But now, I don't need to run all that at home unless I have specific learning objectives. So I keep my home network a lot simpler than it used to be, as a result.
nathan_douglas 1y ago
I credit homelabbing through my twenties with just about everything good that's happened to me in my career. I certainly didn't end up being moderately employable because I'm smart, charismatic, incisive, creative, lucky, educated, diligent, connected, handsome, sanitary, interesting, or thoughtful; no, it's because I have a tendency toward obsession, delusions of grandeur, and absolutely terrible impulse control. So I started buying junk on eBay and trying to connect it together and make it do things, and the more frustrated I got, the less able I was to think about literally anything else, and I'd spend all night poking around on Sourceforge or random phpBBs trying to get the damn things to compile or communicate or tftp boot or whatever I wanted them to do. The only problem was eventually I got good enough that I actually _could_ keep the thing running and my wife and kid and I started putting good stuff on my computers, like movies and TV shows and music and pictures and it started to actually be a big deal when I blew something up. Like, it wasn't just that I felt like a failure, but that I felt like a failure AND my kid couldn't watch Avatar and that's literally all he wanted to watch. So now I have two homelabs, one that keeps my family happy and one that's basically the Cato to my Clouseau, a sort of infrastructural nemesis that will just actually try to kill me. Y'know, for fulfillment.

jjangkke 1y ago

im using proxmox but struggling to setup subnets and vms should I be using terraform and ansible? im using cursor to ssh and it constantly needs to run commands to get "state" of the setup. basically im trying to do what I used to do on AWS: setup VMs on private network talking to each other with one gateway dedicated to internet connection but this is proving to be extremely difficult with the bash scripts generated by cursor if anyone can help me continue my journey with self hosting instead of relying on AWS that would be great

sgc 1y ago
> im using proxmox but struggling to setup subnets and vms That is a pretty broad target. I would say start by setting up an opnsense vm, from there you can do very little to start, just lock down your network so you can work in peace. But it can control your subnet traffic, host your tailscale, dchp server, and adguard home, etc. As somebody who was quite used to hosting my own servers, before I first set up my homelab I thought proxmox would be the heart of it. Actually opnsense is the heart of the network, proxmox is much more in the background. I think proxmox + opnsense is great tech and you should not be adding in terraform and ansible, but I am not sure that using cursor is helping you. You need a really good grasp of what is going on if your entire digital life is going to be controlled centrally. I would lean heavily on the proxmox tutorials and forums, and even more on the opnsense tutorials and forums. Using cursor for less important things afterwards, or to clarify a fine point every once in a while would make more sense.
esseph 1y ago
You don't need any scripts to do that. Read the docs! https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Network_Configuration#_choosing_a_network_configuration https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Network_Configuration#_choosing...
redrove 1y ago
I agree Proxmox default networking is lacking/insufficient at best. If you have VLANs or want to do LACP, anything more advanced than a simple interface you'll run into the limitations of the Proxmox implementation quite quickly. I think the networking experience for hosts is one of the worst things about Proxmox.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

> Relatively easy for family and friends to use > This means keep one login per person, ideally with SSO, for as many services as I can Truly S-tier target. Incredible hard, incredible awesome. I've said for a long time that Linux & open source is kind of a paradox. It goes everywhere, it speaks every protocol. But as a client, as an end. The whole task of coordinating, of groupwareing, of bringing together networks: that's all much harder, much more to be defined. Making the many systems work together, having directory infrastructure: that stuff is amazing. For years I assumed that someday I'd be running FreeIPA or some Windows compatible directory service, but it sort of feels like maybe some OpenID type world might possibly be gel'ing into place.

Abishek_Muthian 1y ago
I completely agree with the paradox, just yesterday I posted how FOSS is not accessible to non-techies on my problem validation platform[1]. I've been thinking if a platform which connects techies to non-techies can help solve that, say like a systems integrator for individuals. [1] https://needgap.com/problems/484-foss-are-not-accessible-to-non-techies-opensource-techsupport https://needgap.com/problems/484-foss-are-not-accessible-to-...
- udev4096 1y ago
  It's not supposed to be. You put in time, use your brain to understand the system. Even a non-techie can easily understand OIDC and Oauth2, it's not that hard
  - nativeit 1y ago
    This seems like a very naive perspective.
  - Thorrez 1y ago
    As a techie, experienced in security, reading the OIDC spec... there are definitely some things I don't understand in there. I'm not sure the authors even understand what's going on. On 2023-12-15 they published an update to OpenID Connect Core 1.0, called "errata set 2". Previously it said to verify an ID token in a token response, the client needs to > * If the ID Token contains multiple audiences, the Client SHOULD verify that an azp Claim is present. > * If an azp (authorized party) Claim is present, the Client SHOULD verify that its client_id is the Claim Value. The new version is quite different. Now it says > * If the implementation is using extensions (which are beyond the scope of this specification) that result in the azp (authorized party) Claim being present, it SHOULD validate the azp value as specified by those extensions. > * This validation MAY include that when an azp (authorized party) Claim is present, the Client SHOULD verify that its client_id is the Claim Value. So core parts of the security of the ID Token are being changed in errata updates. What was the old purpose of azp? What is the new purpose of azp? Hard to tell. Did all the OIDC implementations in existence change to follow the new errata update (which didn't update the version number)? I doubt it. https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231214085702/https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231214085702/https://openid.ne... Or how about a more fundamental question: Why does the ID Token have a signature? What attack does that signature prevent? What use cases does the signature allow? The spec doesn't explain that.

xyzzy123 1y ago

Sometimes when I think about my home network, I think about it in terms of what will happen when I die and what I will be inflicting on my family as the ridiculous setups stop working. Or like, how much it would cost a police forensics team to try to make any sense of it. I think "home labbing" fulfils much the same urge / need as the old guys (I hate to say it but very much mostly guys) met by creating hugely detailed scale model railways in their basement. I don't mean that in a particularly derogatory way, I just think some people have a deep need for pocket worlds they can control absolutely.

udev4096 1y ago
Curious about your setup. Is it extremely unmanageable or have you gone out of your way to make it so?
- xyzzy123 1y ago
  Unifi network; small proxmox vms for core services; big truenas box for movies, storage, "apps ecosystem" stuff like minecraft servers; baremetal 12 node k8s cluster on opi5s for "research" (coz I do lots of k8s at work). Each "stage" above is like incremental failure domains, unifi only keeps internet working, core vms add functionality (like unifi mgmt, rancher, etc), truenas is for "fun extras" etc. k8s lab has nothing I need to keep on it because distributed storage operators are still kind of explodey. Like each part makes sense individually but when I look at the whole thing I start to question my mental health.
- ffsm8 1y ago
  Let's explore the implied argument a lil: Imagine simplest possible deployment you've cooked up. Now imagine explaining your mother how to maintain it after you're dead and she needs to access the files on the service you setup. usually, selfhosting is not particularly hard. It's just conceptually way beyond what the average joe is able to do. (Not because they're not smart enough, but simply because they never learned to and will not learn now because they don't want to form that skill set. And I'm not hating on boomers, you can make the same argument with your hypothetical kids or spouse. The parents are just an easy placeholder because you're biologically required to have them, which isn't the case for any other familial relationship)

perelin 1y ago

Outside of the stated requirements because its not fully open source, but https://www.cloudron.io/ https://www.cloudron.io/ made all my self hosting pains go away.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Setup your own WireGuard rather than Tailscale.. this is too much like Authy delegating AAA to a third-party. - Store your SSH public keys and host keys in LDAP. - Use real Solaris ZFS that works well or stick with mdraid10+XFS, and/or use Ceph. ZoL bit me by creating unmountable volumes and offering zero support when their stuff borked. - Application-notified, quiesced backups to some other nearline box. - Do not give all things internet access. - Have a pair (or a few) bastion jumpboxes, preferably one of the BSDs like OpenBSD. WG and SSH+Yubikey as the only ways inside, both protected by SPA port knocking. - Divy up hardware with a type 1 hypervisor and run kubernetes inside guests in those. - Standardize as much as possible. - Use configuration and infrastructure management tools checked into git. If it ain't automated, it's just a big ball of mud no one know how to recreate. - Have extra infrastructure capacity for testing and failure hot replacements.

udev4096 1y ago
How can one run vanilla wireguard and leverage features offered by headscale? At minimum, a bunch of bash scripts would do the exact same thing, if not worse
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Don't do it with bash. You can at least use Ruby, Python to make an API for it, or use configuration management. They really didn't think about being (local) runtime configurable for the dev/ops UX being too ultra *NIX purist with single file plain text configuration. At least it could have a plain text watch directory like daemontools for dynamic reconfiguration.
  - udev4096 1y ago
    Headscale already has a clean API in go, why recreate the wheel? For fun, sure but production use, I am gonna stick with it
OptionOfT 1y ago
Annoying thing about WireGuard is their outdated and buggy iOS client. When you set up a dns with A and AAAA it'll prefer the A address, even when you're on a 646xlat network, so now that connection is proxied and will time out after a while.

lofaszvanitt 1y ago

Why people need these overly complicated setups and why do they need to have an access point to reach their "den" from anywhere is beyond me. People and their digital gadget delusion. Security paranoia, but here are the details of my home lab. WHY? If god forbid someone gets in they could in an instant identify the target...

dedge 1y ago

IMO this is too complicated. I think products like the Synology Disk Station strike a better balance between ownership of data and maintenance over time. Tailscale even publishes a client for Synology products.

mirdaki 1y ago
Everyone will have different goals and preferences. For instance, my dad just wanted a way to backup and remotely access some files, so we got him a Synology NAS. It's great for it's target users and if you're one of them, awesome! I just don't like the lock-in that you get Synology. Plus I do enjoy tinkering with these things, so I wanted to put together something that balances usability, complexity while minimizing that lock-in
deanc 1y ago
Is this the same Synology that a few years ago numerous people had their boxes ransomwared when they were open to the public internet. Synology continues to be shit value for the tools you get and as much as I want the convenience of ready to go software and hardware they cannot be relied on.
- hum3hum3 1y ago
  I am thinking about replacing my Synology BUT I have had three and now ECC over the last 20 years and they have done their job faullessly. There are stupid things now like complaining about non Synology ram modules.
  - deanc 1y ago
    The latest news I heard is DSM complaining about non Synology hard drives too.

jancsika 1y ago

Is there home lab for isolated LAN and "self-sufficient" devices? I want to have a block of gunk on the LAN, and to connect devices to the LAN and be able to seamlessly copy that block to them. Bonus: any gunk I bring home gets added to the block. First part works with navidrome: I just connect through the LAN to my phone with amperfy and check the box to cache the songs. Now my song gunk is sync'd to the phone before I leave home. This obviously would fit a different mindset. Author has a setup optimized for maximum conceivable gunk, whereas mine would need to be limited to the maximum gunk you'd want to have on the smallest device. (But I do like that constraint.)

sandreas 1y ago

Nice writeup, thank you. I already thought about having NixOS on my server, but currently I prefer proxmox. There are projects with NixOS + Proxmox, but I did not test it yet. > My main storage setup is pretty simple. It a ZFS pool with four 10TB hard drives in a RAIDZ2 data vdev with an additional 256GB SDD as a cache vdev. That means two hard drives can die without me loosing that data. That gives me ~19TB of usable storage, which I’m currently using less than 10% of. Leaving plenty of room to grow. I would question this when buying a new system and not having a bunch of disks laying around... having a RAID-Z2 with four 10GB disks offers the same space as a RAID1 with two 20GB disks. Since you don't need the space NOW, you could even go RAID1 with two 10TB disks and grow it by replacing it with two 20TB as soon as you need more. This in my opinion would be more cost effective, since you only need to replace 2 disks instead of 4 to grow. This would take less time and since prices per TB are probably getting lower over time, it could also save you a ton of money. I would also say that the ability of losing 2 disks won't save you from having a backup somewhere...

mirdaki 1y ago
Oh yeah, I don't think the way I went about it was necessarily the most cost effective. I bought half of them on sale one year, didn't get around to setting things up, then bought the other two a year later on another sale once I finally got my server put together. I got them before I had my current plan in place. At one point I thought about having more services in a Kubernets cluster or something, but dropped that idea Also agree, RAID isn't a replacement for a backup. I have all my important data on my desktop and laptop with plans for a dedicated backup server in the future. RAID does give you more breathing room if things go wrong, and I decided that was worth it
- sandreas 1y ago
  I went through the same situation and noticed that modern hard drives are big enough for fitting RAID1 into nearly every homelab use case except high-res Video footage (including a bluray movie collection) Two drives are easy to replace, easy to spare, consume less power and are quieter than 4+. The only advantage i See in raid5/6 is on 25Tb of storage requirement within 3 years.

chippyhendrix 1y ago

[flagged]

meehai 1y ago

Mine is much more barebone: - one single machine - nginx proxy - many services on the same machine; some are internal, some are supposed to be public, are all accessible via the web! - internal ones have a humongous large password for HTTP basic auth that I store in an external password manager (firefox built in one) - public ones are either public or have google oauth I coded all of them from scratch as that's the point of what I'm doing with homelabbing. You want images? browsers can read them. Videos? Browsers can play them. The hard part is the backend for me. The frontend is very much "90s html".

mirdaki 1y ago
Nice! I have a friend who is starting to program his infrastructure/services from scratch. It's a neat way to learn and make things fit well for your own needs
qmr 1y ago
HTTP sends password in cleartext. Better to use a self signed certificate at least.

Aeolun 1y ago

I’ve got to appreciate putting the matrix server on Coruscant if nothing else :)

mirdaki 1y ago
Thank you! The naming add a little bit of extra fun to it

irusensei 1y ago

> Authelia provides authentication and authorization for services in a couple of ways. For services that support OpenID Connect it provides a very simple single sign on experience. If not, Authelia can integrate with my reverse proxy (nginx) and require the user login before the reverse proxy allows access to a service. Recently I found out Gitea or Forgejo can act as an Oauth provider. And since these support ldap you can for example deploy a Samba AD and set it up as an authentication source for Gitea/Forgejo. If you enable the OAuth feature you can connect stuff like grafana and log in with your Samba AD credentials. To me this is more convenient than running a dedicated auth service considering Forgejo can also provide git, wiki, docker registry (also authenticated) and other function. It's such an underrated piece of software and uses so few resources.

noncoml 1y ago

What’s the power consumption?

mirdaki 1y ago
That is a great question I don't actually know the answer to. I need to grab something to track it

denkmoon 1y ago

I woke up today with a plan of making my DNS at a separate site work properly with ipv6, over my wireguard. I use ULAs for the point to point wireguard link, and GUAs don't like routing to ULAs. I figured the choice was between routing my two sites GUAs over the wireguard when talking to each other, or deploy ULAs in my networks. 4hrs later I had everything set up with ULAs. Had lunch. Decided that was awful. 3hrs after that I've got my GUAs going over the wireguard. Homelabbing is fun :')

mirdaki 1y ago
Yes it is, rock on!

dakiol 1y ago

I like it. Why Flame, though? It’s built using node, react, redux… meaning you are bringing dozens (if not hundreds) of third party dependencies to your secure kingdom. I don’t think it’s worth it for the start page (could easily be a single html page with hardcoded links)

mirdaki 1y ago
It's entirely because I've used it before. I just wanted something familiar to solve a problem quickly. I also think it looks nice. I'm not too worried about the security implications, since it is behind Tailscale and Authelia. I'm not committed to it, and do want to explore other options in the future

mmcnl 1y ago

I too use LLDAP and Authelia. I use Caddy (no Traefik) as a reverse proxy to protect my services using 2FA SSO. It's very easy to use and I can access all my services anywhere in the world without bothering with a VPN.

qiine 1y ago

Very interesting write-up! At this rate if I keep seeing good article about NixOS I might actually switch for real haha!

fariszr 1y ago

Great blog post, but unfortunately from my experience with my kinda tech-friendly family, i can tell you that not exposing service publicly is an absolute UX killer. Nobody uses the local nextcloud because they just don't think they can rely on it, it doesn't always work from their perspective, and is too finicky to use, because it needs an external app (Tailscale). This can be only fixed when the app itself can trigger a vpn connection, and I don't think this is going to happen any time soon.

mirdaki 1y ago
I do have to sit down and walk folks through setting up Tailscale, Nextcloud, etc on their devices. So far though, I haven't had any complaints once that is done. Nextcloud just syncs in the background and they can navigate to sites like normal. But my family is probably more tech literate than most, so that helps
- fariszr 1y ago
  Yeah but that means they have to be aware of the need to activate tailscale on their phones manually everytime they want to use your apps. On PC I agree, you can just leave it running, on mobile though it chews through the battery like it's nothing.
zbentley 1y ago
An easy solve for this is to buy public domains for the sites you want to use, run a static website on them that says “turn on tailscale to access this site, set that up here (link to download a client preconfigured for my tailnet, invite only of course)”, then use tailscale DNS overrides to set up CNAMEs for that public DNS’s (sub)domains which point to the tailnet internal service domains.
- fariszr 1y ago
  This would work if they didn't use the apps, which in the case of nextcloud they do.
- fariszr 1y ago

nicomt 1y ago

It's not open-source or self-hosted but putting it out there: CloudFlare zero-trust is amazing and free. In my setup, I have a cloudflared tunnel configured in my homelab machine and I expose individual services without a VPN or opening up my firewall. You can also set up authentication with SSO, and it happens before reaching the backend application which makes it more secure. This is easy for family and friends to use, because they don't need to setup anything from their side, just go to the URL and login. https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections...

cromka 1y ago
I seriously don’t understand why would people choose this over not exposing anything at all, except for Wireguard port. I have my client to automatically connect my home LAN when I’m not on WiFi and get access to all my self-hosted services without risking anything. You rely on third party solution which may or may not be made to government agencies. You also need to trust they Cloudflare doesn’t make mistakes, either. Also, how do you configure Cloudflare for a road warrior setup? How do you track ever changing dynamic IPs? As mentioned, all I need is a Wireguard client and I’m golden.
- nicomt 1y ago
  > You rely on third party solution which may or may not be made to government agencies. That's a fair point, but for my use case, I feel comfortable enough with CloudFlare given the trade-offs. > You also need to trust they Cloudflare doesn’t make mistakes, either. I think the chances of CloudFlare making a mistake are much lower than me or any other individual Developer. > Cloudflare for a road warrior setup? How do you track ever changing dynamic IPs? I think you need to read the docs. All of that works without any extra config when using tunnels.
javier2 1y ago
CloudFlare zero-trust is very good, but i thought you need to have Cloudflare as man-in-the-middle on your domain to have this authentication flow work? ie. the TLS certs needs to live with Cloudflare.

nitnelave 1y ago

LDAP author here. I'm happy that LLDAP is mentioned and yet that it is not highlighted. The goal of the project was to have a simple LDAP server that is easy to install/manage for self-hosters without knowledge of LDAP required. Cheers and congrats on your setup!

mirdaki 1y ago
Thank you for the work and the kind words! I've had a great experience with LLDAP. Really appreciate it

threemux 1y ago

I don't have a very complex setup but I've been super happy with gokrazy for my rpis: https://gokrazy.org/ https://gokrazy.org/ OS upgrades are easy now and it's declarative but I don't have to learn Nix

hum3hum3 1y ago
Me too. It works really well now that I have a silent version with SSD and passive heat sink. This avoids my son turning it off because the fan noise annoys him. I am thinking about adding kubernetes for failure resilience but that is a work in progress. I am happy to start digging into Authelia. Are you using the gokrazy router as well?
- threemux 1y ago
  I'm not using the router, but I do like reading about Stapelberg's quest for ridiculous home Internet speeds! I make do with standard gigabit fiber haha

piyuv 1y ago

Excellent write up. Can I ask why did you choose headscale instead of WireGuard?

mirdaki 1y ago
I found the Tailscale client experience is quite nice and headscale had built in OIDC support (so easy auth for my users) If I started this setup later I might have also used pangolin, which also provides a nice management interface on top of WireGuard https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin

evnix 1y ago

I wish I had the time to do any of this. I could probably do it on a weekend but maintaining it, upgrading it to keep up with new releases would be something I wouldn't have time for. I end up just paying a cloud provider and forget about it. Anyone else on the same boat? What has been your approach?

SomeoneOnTheWeb 1y ago
Honestly, I self-host about a dozen services and upgrades take me less than a minute per month usually. I simply have one folder per service, each folder contains a docker-compose stack and a storage directory. Updating is simply a matter of running `docker compose pull` and `docker compose up -d`. Nothing more. Breaking updates requiring to tweak the config are very uncommon, and even when they happen it's only a few minutes of checking the updated config and applying it. IMO this is the simplest way to self-host. No VM, no complex software install, nothing more than a simple Docker Compose setup that's fully automated.
- doubled112 1y ago
  That sounds similar to my setup, but each folder is a btrfs subvolume and my update script takes a snapshot before updating. I keep the Docker compose file together with the volumes in that subvolume. If something breaks I can decide to figure out why, or revert.
beala 1y ago
It's usually not a single weekend. If you're like me, it starts out with thinking it'd be nice to install Plex on an old gaming PC. A year later, it has organically grown into a rube goldberg machine of proxmox and home automation. Which I guess just reinforces your point. Joking aside, a minimal setup just using docker compose is pretty manageable. Self hosting many projects is as easy as 'docker compose up -d', and upgrades are straightforward as others have pointed out.
mirdaki 1y ago
With previous setups, I was certainly guilt of not upgrading and doing the maintenance needed. That's one reason why I like using NixOS and ZFS. Both provide really easy rollback options. So all I need to do is run an update and rebuild. If things work, no more for me to do. If things don't, I can try debugging or just revert back to the previous release till I have time to But also I think using a cloud provider is fine if you're happy with the experience. It is a time sink to get things setup and it's not zero maintenance time. It's reasonable to weight those costs

codethief 1y ago

> Here is a diagram of where I’ve ended up: In case the author is around: On mobile (Chrome on Android) the screenshot is not readable at all and there is also no way to open an enlarged version, let alone zoom into the page.

aembleton 1y ago
Same on Firefox. Here's the diagram as a zoomable image https://codecaptured.com/blog/images/ultimate-self-hosting/diagram.png https://codecaptured.com/blog/images/ultimate-self-hosting/d...
mirdaki 1y ago
Oh thanks for pointing it out! I've updated it so clicking on the diagram opens it up directly

djhworld 1y ago

I've been tempted to use NixOS for my self hosted setup but I just can't bring myself to do it. My setup is quite simple, it's just a few VMs with one docker compose file for each. I have an ansible playbook that copies the docker compose files across and that's it. There's really nothing more to it then that, and maintenance is just upgrading the OS (Fedora Server) once the version reaches EOL. I tend to stay 1 version behind the release cycle so upgrade whenever that gets bumped. I do use nix-darwin on my macs so I do _see_ the value of using a nix configuration, but I find it difficult to see if the effort in porting my setup to Nix is worth it in the long run, configuration files don't get written in a short time. Maybe LLMs could speed this up, but I just don't have it in me right now to make that leap

Havoc 1y ago
Explored it a bit, but found the incremental gain to be not massive if you're already using IaC of some sort
entropie 1y ago
> I've been tempted to use NixOS for my self hosted setup but I just can't bring myself to do it. I recently tried nixos and after spending a week trying it out, I switched my home network and 2 production servers to nixos. It has been running as expected for 3,4 months now and I LOVE it. Migrating the servers was way easier than the workstations. My homeserver was setup in a few hours. I also recently bought a jetson orin nano to play and learn on and I set up nixos with jetpack-nixos there too. I know with gentoo this would have been a (much) more painful process. I have used gentoo for over 20 years and have always felt very much at home. What annoyed me was that the compile times on older computers were simply unbearable. Compiling GHC on my 2019 dell xps just takes 6 hours or something like that.
mirdaki 1y ago
The big difference for me was NixOS provides really simple rollbacks if something goes wrong, where with Ansible and compose files, that's possible, but you have to do it yourself But also if you're setup is working for you, I think that's great! It sounds like you have a good system in place

beala 1y ago

A pain point you mention is that everyone must run the tailscale client. Have you considered exposing everything on the public internet using something like Cloudflare Tunnels? You can have cloudflare handle auth on their edge network, which mitigates the worry about having to deal with 0-days on a self hosted auth solution. You have a pretty sophisticated directory setup tho so I'm not sure how well this would fit in with the existing infra.

mirdaki 1y ago
It is something I considered. Ultimately I didn't want to depend on Clouflare (or any other provider) for something as core to my setup as my remote access But it's a totally valid option, just not one that fit with my preferences

master_crab 1y ago

Why bother with SSO? If your family and closest friends use something like a wireguard client (iOS for example has a very good one that takes only a minute to configure permanently), the users simply switch a toggle and they are now on your private network and don’t need to SSO to anything (provided you have left everything open). For a small home network the pros of that approach vastly exceed the cons.

haswell 1y ago
I self host about 20 separate apps. I’m in the middle of an SSO implementation project because I do not want to continue managing credentials for 20 separate apps. I’ve considered opening some of these apps to family members, and having one place to deal with any auth issues is a high priority for me. I can’t agree with your conclusion.
- master_crab 1y ago
  That’s ok. But step back further. Do you need to fine grain permission people on the majority of those apps? If you don’t, then SSO is more of a pain than it’s worth. Simply control the network access and leave the apps alone.
  - haswell 1y ago
    How are you defining fine grained permissions? All I care about is having separate accounts for each person who will log in, even if I’m the only person. I again can’t agree with your conclusion that this is more pain than it’s worth. But it’s possible we just have different priorities.
mirdaki 1y ago
The services we use, like Nextcloud or Mealie, are designed for folks to have their own user accounts. SSO means they can use the same login across all of them without me having to manage that for them (and also avoids me having to know their passwords). It does complicated the setup, but not the operation, and that makes it more likely folks will use the services

stephenlf 1y ago

Great read. Thanks for sharing.

grep_name 1y ago

This is kinda similar to something I'm trying to setup. I have most of my self-hosted infrastructure running in docker containers, but I want to put some stuff on a nixOS ec2 instance. Mostly services I want to never go down or be affected by my local network (uptime kuma) and chat stuff (irc bouncer, conduit, soju, etc etc). I use nixOS on my laptop but don't make many nix projects, and TBH I have no idea how to test this setup locally before deploying it. I have some nix stuff setup that spins up a VM and exposes the ports on localhost, but it's brittle and rapidly spaghettifying. Do you have any tips for testing this stuff as part of a local project?

mirdaki 1y ago
I've done two kinds of testing On my NixOS laptop I you can setup services I'm interested in trying, but just run them locally. So I don't setup things like SSL (you can, it sometimes just makes getting a new SSL cert for that same domain take some time). I just update my /etc/hosts to the local IP and can give that a go For trying out the more complicated setup parts, like SSL, Tailscale, etc, I created a NixOS VM that I setup the same way I wanted for my "production" use case. Once I have the config file the way I wanted, it's as simple as moving it to my non test VM (baring previous mentioned SSL issues). And I only tested one part at a time, adding them together as I went But also, one of the great things about NixOS is it's really easy to incrementally try things and rollback. Once I got the skeleton of the setup working, I've mostly done my testing on my "production" server without issue

weitendorf 1y ago

I have been getting into this too. I caution anybody with self-hosting/tinkering tendencies against starting a tech company because it just makes it so much easier to justify this stuff... Eventually serving a regular old container doesn't cut it anymore and you find yourself needing to pay these weird newspapers nobody reads to publish your business' alias because it's a requirement for a legal DBA which ASIN needs to let you get your own IPV6 block, which you need to truly own you and your customers' IPs and it's not worth becoming an AS without it, but then you can actually move towards physically become your own ISP and then... The ingress problem people solve with tailscale is one of the hardest. I'm curious to see if it's possible to implement STUN/TURN [0-1] with a generally good mechanism for exposing the server to the Internet by caching all static files and blocking dynamic access to the backend with a loginwall, which authenticates allowed users with email "magic links" -> nonrenewable access tokens. In theory it should not be excessively difficult, expensive, or risky to do this. It's just relevant enough to what we're doing with remote development environments for me to justify another rabbit hole [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relays_around_NAT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relays_around_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN

zrail 1y ago
I have ingress set up with Fly.io. Simple caching nginx config on the remote end with a Fly Wireguard peer set up as an extra container in the appropriate ingress pod. It's not free but it's the least expensive way I can find to get anycast ingress and not expose any ports to the internet from my homelab.

sylens 1y ago

Great write-up. I have been tinkering with Immich over the last few months and go back and forth whether I want to just limit it to Tailscale for use away from home or if I want to go through the trouble of setting up a reverse proxy on a VPS. I think my biggest concern is finding a relatively user-friendly monitoring/security solution to alert me if anybody is trying some sort of attack against the VPS

clueless 1y ago
that's a great concern as I'm in the same boat. What have you find with regards to the monitoring/security solution?
th0rgall 1y ago
I've learned to live with having WireGuard/Tailscale on all the time on my own devices. But for giving (extended) family & friends access to shared albums with Immich, it's too impractical to configure and explain widely. I've been using a Cloudflare Tunnel for this situation with their "Zero Trust" email-based authentication. It probably won't work with the Immich mobile app though, since I doubt that client can handle Cloudflare's interstitial login screen.
- sylens 1y ago
  You can setup Google oauth authentication on Cloudflare zero trust and pass that right through to Immich’s support for Oauth for a pretty seamless experience

xyst 1y ago

It’s a shame he doesn’t self host an internal mail server at least with restricted outbound/smtp. Something like this is very easy to setup with projects such as stalwart which also offers CardDAV and CardDAV (think easy synchronization of calendar and contacts without relying on "cloud"). He already has tailscale + headscale, adding in an internal only mail/collaboration server would be a win.

mirdaki 1y ago
Hey, I ruled out a mail server for external, since I've heard many people have issues with other providers (Gmail, Outlook, etc) randomly blocking email. Didn't feel I could rely on it Having an internal only mail server for notifications is an interesting idea. I've been using ntfy and Matrix to achieve something like that, but not all services support those notification methods. I'll keep that in mind!

ukanwat 1y ago

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ctkhn 1y ago

Curious what the driver for nixos and packages over docker was. Docker was the huge step up for me in making the homelab easy to run, update, and recover when things failed. It also made managing services endpoints and ports remote easier than when they all lived on the operating system. Wish this was delved into a little more in the post.

mirdaki 1y ago
I can touch on it more. Docker and compose files are great for getting things going, contained, and keeping everything declarative But I found the more services I used with Docker, the more time it took to update. I didn't want to just update to latest, I wanted to update to specific version, for better rollback. That meant manually checking and updating every single service, bringing each file down, and then back up. It's not entirely unmanageable, but it became enough friction I wasn't updating things consistently. And yes, I could have automated some of that, but never got around to it NixOS, in addition to the things I mention in the post, is just a two step process to update everything (`nix flake update` and `nixos-rebuild`). That makes updating my OS and every package/service super easy. And provides built in rollback if it fails. Plus I can configure things like my firewall and other security things in NixOS with the same config I do everything else Also, Nix packages/services provides a lot of the "containerization" benefits. It's reproducible. It doesn't have dependency problems (see this for morehttps://nixos.org/guides/how-nix-works/ https://nixos.org/guides/how-nix-works/). And most services use separate users with distinct permissions, giving pretty good security. It's not that Docker can't do those things. It's that Nix does those things in a way that work really well with how I think

sn0n 1y ago

> general approach, lists nixos first *Leaves page* can't do it...

jstrebel 1y ago

Impressive setup, but I would assume it to be very operations-intensive because of the high number of deployed components and their complex configuration. Plus, if you are serious about self-hosting, you would need the facilities and infrastructure to deploy it: server rack, redundant power supply, smoke detectors, fire extinguisher... I would never let my PC-grade hardware run unsupervised in my home. And if I understood correctly, you would still have to have some server on the Internet for running your Headscale VPN, so you need your own dedicated Internet connection - ADSL, dial-up, cable modem would not be enough.

jc__denton 1y ago

Never understood the obsession with Tailscale. I've got an on-demand WireGuard VPN back into my home network with both split (DNS and local service access) and full tunnels. I externally host more prominent things on a VPS and have a tunnel back in for the few services I do want to expose. A mesh VPN just seems like another potential vector into my LAN and Yet Another Subscription in a time when I'm trying to cutback costs on subscription services.