Tangential question - what are people using their homelab for / what are some interesting or useful projects you've spun up on them? I've been thinking about setting one up but not 100% sure I'd find use out of it :)
At the risk of leaking info to any toes I step on w.r.t my home environment,
- home assistant
- Network Video Recorder
- Jellyfin
- network management such as ubiquiti or omada etc
- vault warden/1pass/other secrets servers
- tailscale or wire guard server
- build server/k8s test environment
- private artifactory or mirror (especially useful if you're using the same distro on a bunch of devices but don't want to overload the actual mirror+improves download times)
- torrents (someone's gotta seed Wikipedia)
- onsite backups
- bastion into your home network (see also: wire guard)
- some people even use it for their router
You could also take a look at the tteck scripts, there's a bunch of cool stuff in there
I'm just going to repeat a bunch of what hughesjj has already said, but anyway:
OPNSense (as my household's internet interface), Unifi Controller (as my household's primary wifi), Jellyfin, Wireguard, Pi-hole, LMS[0], Frigate NVR (migrating off ZoneMinder, awaiting delivery of a Coral TPU to finalise this), couchdb (as Noteself[1] back-end), nginx (serving a handful of sites for my own entertainment), Mailu[2], Calibre[3], various other in-flight experiments (which Home Assistant will soon become, Bitmagnet DHT scraper).
Most of the above are docker instances hosted on a small number of VMs hosted on two (or sometimes three) physical machines running proxmox.
I have Proxmox on my older (11th gen) Intel NUC - it runs my Unifi network controller for my WiFi APs, an Unbound DNS cache (because my router doesn't support DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS), a NAS (using ZFS on some hard drives in a USB 3.2 Gen 2, 6-drive disk chassis - the ZFS managed directly by Proxmox and then a Debian container just doing Samba).
That's all for now but I've just installed Home Assistant but haven't set that up yet. I also intend to try out Jellyfin as a media server and Frigate as a video recorder when I get some cheap cameras.
I started with a home lab a few months back. Its basically an old miniPC running Proxmox virtualization and LCX containers. Mostly it helps me learn various technology I have not much experience with in my work. I run about 20+ services on the home lab. Some of them include:
Open WebUI which can connect to the OpenAI api or a local Ollama LLM. You can also connect various tools to the LLM like a calculator or web search to augment them. The AI has helped me learn how to configure and debug stuff. Like I got step-ca to setup a local certificate authority and give certificates to my various internal services. I played around with configuring Caddy and Nginx along with ACME to the the step-ca. The LLM was even helping be debug my config files.
I'm also using Hoarder for bookmarking and it can use AI to automatically tag your bookmarks. It can even backup the webpages.
I've been using Mealie to clip and save online recipes.
I'm running Uptime Kuma to check if my computers and services are up and if they are down, I'll get a notification.
- home assistant (just a few currently, more soon)
- paperless:absolutely awesome document management system
- immich: image management with automatic synchro of my mobile taken images (ML features)
- tailscale
- StirlingPDF: simple tools for all things PDF
- home assistant - Network Video Recorder - Jellyfin - network management such as ubiquiti or omada etc - vault warden/1pass/other secrets servers - tailscale or wire guard server - build server/k8s test environment - private artifactory or mirror (especially useful if you're using the same distro on a bunch of devices but don't want to overload the actual mirror+improves download times) - torrents (someone's gotta seed Wikipedia) - onsite backups - bastion into your home network (see also: wire guard) - some people even use it for their router
You could also take a look at the tteck scripts, there's a bunch of cool stuff in there