I used pihole for years, but the recent updates made me look for alternatives. There was a major (v6?) update fuckup, but also some random freezes and block lists going missing…
Looking for alternatives, I tried out Technitium. Extremely easy to set up, rock solid, running steady for about 6 months (with frequent updates), and they recently introduced built in high-availability.
Hosted with Jellyfin, for clients I use Symfonium on Android and Feishin on desktop.
Oversimplifying it, Ansible playbooks are nothing more than some commands that should be run on a remote machine via ssh. Ansible knows or has modules for a variety of different package managers (apt, yum, etc) and automagically knows how to handle services or various config files.
It can get complex, but I think just the startup phase, until you have an inventory of remote machines, the ssh keys are in place, etc. I second the Jeff Geerling recommendation, his stuff is solid, both ready to use playbooks, and tutorials.
I would suggest to also look into cloudinit. Makes setting up VMs on proxmox easier, faster, more consistent, with users, networking, ssh keys, etc ready to use (by you or by Ansible).
This is a great addition to my home-lab, no more “free online convert” tools needed.
I personally use my home lab to test and learn, and I try to mimic a corporate environment. I have multiple instances of DNS, proxy, etc and I have a “prod” and a separate “staging” k8s environment. I try as much as possible, without going nuts about it, to update and try new changes that might be breaking in the staging cluster.
60k stars for a free open source self hosted project? I’d say that’s a really healthy number. Jellyfin has 37k.
Check out crowdsec. Like fail2ban, but with crowdsourced lists on top.
I did not know about opencloud.eu, and now I’m intrigued. I was always looking for a simple Google Drive alternative, but Nextcloud was too much. Will definitely keep an eye on it.
Like other people suggested here, use opnsense instead of pfsense, and wireguard instead of openvpn. What I did for my homelab was to get a used HP t620 thinclient and an Intel 350 card with 2x 1gbps ports. You say you have 10gbps, so you would need a card that can handle that, and maybe a beefier CPU. For my setup, this tiny 65€ machine is not even feeling it. Single digit cpu usage for 2 wireguard connections, a little over 1GB RAM usage for a handful of services. I think for you an n100 with 4gb of ram is more than enough, but going for 8gb will be better and it will not be much more expensive.
For live monitoring (not offline!), maybe dozzle can help?
I use the reporting tools on my opnsense box.
igb0 / yearly
year rx | tx | total | avg. rate
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
2023 33.97 TiB | 22.90 TiB | 56.87 TiB | 15.86 Mbit/s
2024 110.69 TiB | 32.26 TiB | 142.95 TiB | 39.76 Mbit/s
2025 22.20 GiB | 7.14 GiB | 29.34 GiB | 4.35 Mbit/s
------------------------+-------------+-------------+---------------
Project Zomboid. B42 is out!
Just a thought, but instead of a full windows install / live USB - what about a freedos live USB? You should be able to run exe files from there (assuming the bios exe does not need any GUI libraries).
As a neurodivergent dude growing up emotionally neglected (with cptsd because of that), I only started living after I left home.
My advice, and that was really hard for me - start trusting people. Not blindly, but at least try. Also, ask for help. You will be surprised by the amount of people that actually say yes.
Oh, later edit - learn to cook. Basic stuff at first, but that will help with your diet, your budget, impressing some so…
I’m actually doing the opposite :)
I’ve been using vms, lxc containers and docker for years. In the last 3 years or so, I’ve slowly moved to just docker containers. I still have a few vms, of course, but they only run docker :)
Containers are a breeze to update, there is no dependency hell, no separate vms for each app…
More recently, I’ve been trying out kubernetes. Mostly to learn and experiment, since I use it at work.
How do you get the data on to the cloud storage? Maybe use something like restic, which can handle encryption, snapshots, etc.
Also, mici.
If you open a terminal,
cd <location>and runls -la, what do you get? Who’s the owner and what are the permissions of the subdirectories?Are there any errors in the Jellyfin interface? Have you checked the logs?
777 permissions are a bit overkill, I think 755 should be enough, since you don’t need to “execute” mkv file.