Nice

Only host what you need.

With the enshittification of streaming platforms, a Kodi or Jellyfin server would be a great starting point. In my case, I have both, and the Kodi machine gets the files from the Jellyfin machine through NFS.

Or Home Assistant to help keep IOT devices that tend to be more IoS. Or a Nextcloud server to try to degoogle at least a little bit.

Maybe a personal Friendica instance for your LAN so your family can get their Facebook addiction without giving their data to Meta?

With containers, most will have a persistent volume that is mapped to the host filesystem. This is where your config data is. When you update a container, just the image is updated(pihole binaries) but it leaves the config files there. Things like your block lists and custom dns settings, theme settings, all of that will remain.

Excalidraw. Reading is hard. (Yeah, I missed that it was mentioned in the thread)

Glad to have gotten you back into the grind!

My homelab runs on an N100 board I ordered on Aliexpress for ~150€, plus some 16GB Corsair DDR5 SODIMM RAM. The Main VPS is a 2 vCPU 4GB RAM machine, and the LabProxy is a 4 vCPU 4GB RAM ARM machine.

That’s a tough one. I’ve pieced this all together from countless guides for each app itself, combined with tons of reddit reading.

There are some sources that I can list though:

• https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ is great to find apps you might want to host
• https://docs.ibracorp.io/ mainly aims at Unraid hosting, but the information can oftentimes be transferred
• https://how2host.it has some start-to-finish guides that explain every setup step
• https://github.com/mikeroyal/Self-Hosting-Guide is an incredibly long list of apps and ressources you can use as a launchpad. Note the “Tutorials & Ressources” Section for further links

Had to look up what a few of these were myself, check the sidebar resources: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

I heard about tailscale first, and haven’t yet had enough trouble to attempt a switch.

Tail scale is stupid easy to set up and free for first ten devices.

You should see some of the literal data centers folks have in their houses. It’s nuts.

The crowdsec agent running on my homelab (8 Cores, 16GB RAM) is currently sitting idle at 96.86MiB RAM and between 0.4 and 1.5% CPU usage. I have a separate crowdsec agent running on the Main VPS, which is a 2 vCPU 4GB RAM machine. There, it’s using 1.3% CPU and around 2.5% RAM. All in all, very manageable.

There is definitely a learning curve to it. When I first dove into the docs, I was overwhelmed by all the new terminology, and wrapping my head around it was not super straightforward. Now that I’ve had some time with it though, it’s become more and more clear. I’ve even written my own simple parsers for apps that aren’t on the hub!

What I find especially helpful are features like explain, which allow me to pass in logs and simulate which step of the process picks that up and how the logs are processed, which is great when trying to diagnose why something is or isn’t happening.

The crowdsec agent running on my homelab is running from the docker container, and uses pretty much exactly the stock configuration. This is how the docker container is launched:

  crowdsec:
    image: crowdsecurity/crowdsec
    container_name: crowdsec
    restart: always
    networks:
      socket-proxy:
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      DOCKER_HOST: tcp://socketproxy:2375
      COLLECTIONS: "schiz0phr3ne/radarr schiz0phr3ne/sonarr"
      BOUNCER_KEY_caddy: as8d0h109das9d0
      USE_WAL: true
    volumes:
      - /mnt/user/appdata/crowdsec/db:/var/lib/crowdsec/data
      - /mnt/user/appdata/crowdsec/acquis:/etc/crowdsec/acquis.d
      - /mnt/user/appdata/crowdsec/config:/etc/crowdsec

Then there’s the Caddyfile on the LabProxy, which is where I handle banned IPs so that their traffic doesn’t even hit my homelab. This is the file:

{
	crowdsec {
		api_url http://homelab:8080
		api_key as8d0h109das9d0
		ticker_interval 10s
	}
}

*.mydomain.com {
	tls {
		dns cloudflare skPTIe-qA_9H2_QnpFYaashud0as8d012qdißRwCq
	}
	encode gzip
	route {
		crowdsec
		reverse_proxy homelab:8443
	}
}

Keep in mind that the two machines are connected via tailscale, which is why I can pass in the crowdsec agent with its local hostname. If the two machines were physically separated, you’d need to expose the REST API of the agent over the web.

I hope this helps clear up some of your confusion! Let me know if you need any further help with understanding it. It only gets easier the more you interact with it!

don’t worry, all credentials in the two files are randomized, never the actual tokens

Hey! I’m also running my homelab on unraid! :D

The reverse proxy basically allows you to open only one port on your machine for generic web traffic, instead of opening (and exposing) a port for each app individually. You then address each app by a certain hostname / Domain path, so either something like movies.myhomelab.com or myhomelab.com/movies.

The issue is that you’ll have to point your domain directly at your home IP. Which then means that whenever you share a link to an app on your homelab, you also indirectly leak your home location (to the degree that IP location allows). Which I simply do not feel comfortable with. The easy solution is running the traffic through Cloudflare (this can be set up in 15 minutes), but they impose traffic restrictions on free plans, so it’s out of the question for media or cloud apps.

That’s what my proxy VPS is for. Basically cloudflare tunnels rebuilt. An encrypted, direct tunnel between my homelab and a remote server in a datacenter, meaning I expose no port at home, and visitors connect to that datacenter IP instead of my home one. There is also no one in between my two servers, so I don’t give up any privacy. Comes with near zero bandwith loss in both directions too! And it requires near zero computational power, so it’s all running on a machine costing me 3,50 a month.

I see everyone else have already chimed in on whats so great about Caddy (because it is!), one thing that has been a thorn in my side though is the lack of integration of fail2ban since Caddy has moved on from the old common log format and moved on to more modern log formats. So if you want to use a IPS/IDS, you’ll have to either find a creative hack to make it work with fail2ban or rely on more modern (and resource heavier) solutions such as crowdsec.

Pretty sure ruTorrent is a typical download client. The real reason is that it came preinstalled and I never had a reason to change it ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Nope, don’t have that yet. But since all my compose and config files are neatly organized on the file system, by domain and then by service, I tar up that entire docker dir once a week and pull it to the homelab, just in case.

How have you setup your provisioning script? Any special services or just some clever batch scripting?