service-spotlight
Tailscale: reaching your lab from anywhere, safely
Tailscale builds a private mesh network over WireGuard so you can reach home services remotely without opening a single port.
Measuring your network: iperf3, LibreSpeed, and Speedtest Tracker
Three tools that answer three different questions about your network — and why running them yourself tells you more than Ookla ever will.
LiteLLM: one gateway for every AI model
Running multiple AI models from different providers? LiteLLM gives them all a single OpenAI-compatible front door.
Home Assistant: a smart home that stays in your house
Why the leading open-source smart home platform beats cloud ecosystems for privacy, flexibility, and long-term control.
Apache Guacamole: remote desktops in a browser tab
How a clientless remote desktop gateway lets you SSH, RDP, and VNC into anything from any browser — no client software required.
Gotify: push notifications you own
Gotify is a lightweight, self-hosted push notification server that lets your whole homelab talk back to you — no cloud middleman required.
Wazuh: bringing a SOC home
How an open-source SIEM gives a homelab the same threat-detection muscle that enterprise security teams rely on.
Uptime Kuma: a status page in five minutes
Uptime Kuma turns a single Docker container into a real-time monitor and status page for everything you self-host.
Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana: seeing everything at once
How a three-component open-source stack gives you deep visibility into a homelab — and why it's worth the setup cost.
Self-hosted draw.io: diagrams without an account
Run your own draw.io instance and get full-featured infrastructure diagramming with no account, no subscription, and no data leaving your network.
Gitea: your own GitHub, minus the cloud
Gitea is a lightweight, self-hosted Git service that gives you full code ownership, pull requests, webhooks, and CI/CD hooks — on hardware you control.
Hosting static sites at home with a webhook deploy
How a tiny nginx container and a webhook sidecar turn a git push into a live update in seconds.
Homepage: the dashboard that ties the lab together
A plain-language look at Homepage, the self-hosted dashboard that turns a wall of bookmarks into a single pane of glass.
Portainer: a friendly face for Docker
How a web UI turns a scattered fleet of Docker hosts into one manageable dashboard — and when it's worth the setup.
NetBox: a source of truth for your infrastructure
What IPAM and DCIM actually mean, why a homelab needs a source of truth, and how NetBox fills that role.
Authentik: one login for the entire homelab
How a self-hosted identity provider replaces a dozen separate passwords and brings enterprise-grade SSO to your rack.
HashiCorp Vault: where my secrets actually live
A plain-language guide to running HashiCorp Vault in a homelab — what it does, why it matters, and whether you actually need it.
ntopng: actually seeing what is on your network
A plain-language look at network traffic monitoring for homelabs, and why ntopng earned a permanent spot in the rack.
Cloudflare Tunnel: exposing a service without opening a port
How to publish a homelab service to the internet without touching your router or exposing your IP address.
Nginx Proxy Manager: one front door for every service
How a reverse proxy with a friendly web UI tames the chaos of dozens of self-hosted services — no config files required.
OPNsense: turning a PC into a serious firewall
OPNsense brings enterprise-grade routing, firewalling, and VLAN segmentation to commodity hardware — here's why it belongs in a homelab.
Proxmox Backup Server: deduplicated backups that just work
How PBS turns a Proxmox cluster into a self-healing backup machine — and why it's worth the extra VM.
Proxmox VE: the free hypervisor that runs my whole lab
How an open-source hypervisor replaced VMware, unified dozens of VMs under one roof, and turned a rack into a real learning platform.