+1 for Proxmox, has been a fun experience as there are plenty of resources and helper scripts to get you off the ground, jellyfin was the first thing I migrated from my PC, hardware encoding may give you a bit of a tussle but nothing unsolveable. Also note Proxmox is Debian under the hood, so you may find it easy to work with. I looked into unraid, it seems great if all you’re doing for the most part is storage, if you want Linux containers and virtual machines, proxmox js your bet.

I got a small 4 bay 2U server from a friend on the cheap, 1000$ should get you relatively nice new or slightly older used hardware. Even just a PC with a nice amount of drive bays will get you started. And drives are cheap, a raid 1 setup was one of the things I did.

In the end I’ll likely get a separate NAS rack server just to segregate functions, but as of now I simply have a Proxmox LXC mounted to my NAS drives and runs samba to expose them.

Tailscale is a nice set and forget solution for VPN access, I ended up going the route of getting an SSL certified domain and beefing up my firewall a bit. The bit I’ve messed with it it certainly has a learning curve greater than openvpn, but is much more hardened and versatile.

As for pihole, I’ve found AdGuard Home to be just about a suitable replacement, and can be installed along openwrt, though I have a bit of an unconventional router with 512MB of RAM so YMMV

I got a 1U 32GB and a 4 core Xeon for 20$, you just have to make at least 3 more posts

Appreciate the further reading! It’s been a fun rabbit hole and as I see it just keeps going.

Being newer to all this, I’m very hesitant to fully open to the public, especially security wise, as I don’t think too cautious is a thing. What are maybe a few things you had wished you’d known from the start? And pardon me if you have a good read I haven’t gotten to yet 😅

Edit: just read your importance of security post, that’s quite a fright! Thank you for posting of such an incident, it’s invaluable to have mistakes to learn from

Just getting started in my first year of having a homelab running, I really appreciate little insights like these as I am still fairly without direction in the field.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on activitypub and how that may affect personal networking and connectivity in the future, as I see you have your blog tied to your instance, maybe a general guide for some footsteps to follow. Cheers!

I was attempting this, but TP link doesnt actually care to tag their different SSIDs to vlans and don’t provide the configuration to, I only found that their guest may be tagged on some models. Just a word of caution, I think I’ll have to use IP range filters to achieve this

I was genuinely concerened I had a skill issue with NC, glad I’m not alone

Its so weirdly addictive, started with proxmox, then to home assistant, now I have frigate handling PoE cameras, every bedroom has a morning alarm light automation, the vacuum starts itself, its ridiculous

Hey don’t mean to hijack, I know tailscale isnt necessarily a tunnel (correct me if I’m wrong) but does it provide the typical issues with apps like android auto not working while connected to a VPN?

Thank you very much for that final note, I just love misleading marketing tactics and actually may not have noticed. Cheers!

Issue is assigning static IPs to devices like nest cameras and the dubiously branded vacuum cleaner, NAT alone should be enough to restrict connection even if the adapter its on is configured as lan then? Im a little in over my head as far as routing goes, wanting to self host some web server and I want to take as many precautions as necessary (maybe even overkill)

The best way to ensure your data lasts a long time is to use a laser to beam it to the darkest part of the sky. Read speed is abysmal though

There is a plugin for obsidian to work with syncthing, but it seems to still be in development, implementing through the app and selecting the folders also gave me a reason for syncing my camera as well, and was super easy, no portfowarding or anything required

Syncthing is the way, I had tried setting on nextcloud but never could get it to store how I wanted, but syncthinf was ridiculously easy and should work for anything that uses a folder