Over the past few months, I've been playing around with a home server, steadily adding more functionality to it as I troubleshoot various issues that crop up. I'd like to take this blog post to explain why I've been doing this, what exactly a home server is or could be, and why I think you should give it a try as well.

Introduction to Self-Hosting

What is a homelab?

Going by the pictures and descriptions you'll find across the Internet, you may feel like a homelab is a convoluted mess of expensive hardware and endless software/web interfaces that draws a ton of power and turns your house into a small-scale enterprise headquarters. In reality, a homelab is just any group of computing devices that run services accessible to other computing devices on your home network. This could be local file storage, media servers for audio/video content, or really anything you want.

Why bother with it?

Most of what you'd run on a homelab is already taken care of by other cloud services like Google Drive, Spotify, Trello, etc. So in a world where you can just use a 3rd-party service and not have to run everything yourself, why would you choose to create a homelab?

Privacy is one concern you may see come up in discussion around self-hosting and moving away from 3rd-party services. If you upload and store documents on something like Google Drive, then Google has that data stored on their servers. You may not know exactly what kind of information they are harvesting from your data, or what other operations they might perform on it as part of their business practices. When you self-host, you are the one in control of all your data, and you dictate exactly what it's used for, and used by.

Ownership of data kind of goes along with the privacy issues. Do you still own your data if you willingly upload to a server that's operated by a corporate entity? What if that entity decides to shut down the service they were providing, do you still have a right to retrieve your data? Could you even ask them not to shut down the service in the first place? You are at the mercy of a capitalist enterprise, and your data could be collateral damage in their wake.

Speaking of capitalism, many people have ethical concerns with using services provided by these tech giants like Google, Meta, Amazon, etc. In a world of ubiquitous generative AI and plenty of potential legal and ethical ramifications around that kind of exploitative (and ecologically disasterous) behavior, people should be more wary of who they are supporting, even if only by necessity.

Personally, my ethical dilemma centers mostly around my love of music, and my desire to support the artists I enjoy. Streaming platforms like Spotify do not pay their artists what they deserve, and have disrupted the music landscape in ways that I find detrimental to the greater music industry, at least from the perspective of a music listener. Everything is homogenized, and the industry begins to mirror the increasing monopolization of the greater capitalist enterprise landscape. In this case, huge artists are like monopolies, trusts to be busted - attention to be divided up and offered to smaller artists.

This, as well as the propensity of these platforms to invest in and perpetuate systems of the military-industrial complex, has soured me on them entirely. So I purchase the music I listen to on sites like Bandcamp, or other platforms that can adequately pay those artists, and host the digital files on my own music server, curating my own collection of music.

At the end of the day, running a homelab is also fun at least for people like me that enjoy cosplaying as a sysadmin after I come home from working my IT job. You learn a ton about networking, hardware, firewalls, containerization, and a ton more.

My Setup

What am I running?

My homelab currently consists of a couple small computers, some smart home products, and a bunch of Docker containers. I use it for hosting my music server, file storage, task tracking, personal wiki, and more. There's still plenty to be done, but I'm very happy with how it runs for a starter homelab.

Hardware

The vast majority of the homelab is running on a Beelink Mini PC with an Intel N100 chip and an upgraded 2TB SSD. It's small, it's quiet, it's not very power hungry, and it gets the job done. This machine is called 'Ys', named after the Joanna Newsom album.

Sitting on top of the Mini PC is an old Raspberry Pi 3b+, which used to run my old music server. Now the Pi just handles some of the internal networking stuff that I don't want to bother bogging the Beelink down with. This machine is called 'Pink', named after the Boris album.

Not pictured above are the Sonoff Zigbee controller and Philips Hue lights that I purchased as a jumping off point for a smart home network. The controller is just plugged into a USB port on the back of the Beelink.

Software

We'll start with what's running on Pink, since that's simpler. The Pi is just running two things baremetal: Pi-hole (with Unbound) and PiVPN (with Wireguard). Pi-hole serves as my local DNS center, ad blocker, and general networking dashboard outside of my router's browser interface. PiVPN allows me to VPN into my home network from outside the house, and is what makes it so that I don't have to directly expose my services and devices to the public Internet.

Next up is Ys, which currently runs everything in Docker. There's quite a bit here, so let's take it one at a time.

duckdns is running a job that updates the IP address of my DuckDNS static IP to reflect whatever my ISP decides my home router's dynamic IP is. This is what makes the Wireguard VPN work, even when my dynamic IP changes.

Nginx Proxy Manager handles redirecting all my fancy URLs to their respective service endpoints (in conjunction with Pi-hole local DNS records). It also handles applying local self-signed SSL certificates to all my endpoints. This service is called 'Veckatimest', named after the Grizzly Bear album.

Nextcloud is my current "cloud" file storage system of choice. I use it as pretty much a direct replacement for Google Drive (though because it is not exposed to the public I cannot share files with anyone outside of my home network) and that also includes the Calendar and Tasks functionality. This service is called 'Souvlaki', named after the Slowdive album.

OnlyOffice is the document editing suite that I have integrated into my Nextcloud service as a replacement for things like Google Docs, Sheets, etc. You can view and edit documents right inside of Nextcloud, which is very convenient. This service is called 'Vespertine', named after the Björk album.

Home Assistant is the smart home controller/dashboard that I am using with my Zigbee network. It's the latest thing I've added to the homelab, so there isn't much going on here yet besides a couple Hue lights that I can mess with. This service is called 'Superkilen', named after the Svaneborg Kardyb album.

Lyrion Music Server (fka Logitech Media Server) is what I use to run my music streaming server. Setup is simple, adding and removing music is easy, the interface (using the Material Skin plugin) is nice to look at and intuitive to navigate. It doesn't try to be flashy, it doesn't try to emulate Spotify, and because it comes from the lineage of the Logitech Squeezebox ecosystem, it's easy to connect to and play around with via a JSON RPC API. It's my favorite thing that I run, and I love it to death. This service is not named after an album, and is simply called 'Muse'.

Firefly III is what I use to track my finances. I used to use an over-engineered spreadsheet, but this service is much more tailored for how I like to keep track of my expenses and income, as well as bills and other major purchases. This service is called 'Buckminster', named after the Driftless Pony Club album.

Planka is a kanban-style task tracker that I have mostly moved away from in favor of the Tasks app on Nextcloud, though I do still sometimes use Planka for tracking my music and programming projects. This service is called 'Tapestry', named after the Carole King album.

Wiki.js is the platform I use for my personal wiki. At the moment I use it mostly to track various sysadmin information for my homelab, but I plan to use it more as a general information center as time goes on. This service is called 'Relayer', named after the Yes album.

My Experience Thus Far

Creation & Considerations

When setting up my machines, I knew I wanted something simple to deal with and easy to troubleshoot. For my daily drivers and work laptops I use Gentoo, but that certainly is not something I want to deal with for a server with high uptime. So I opted for the latest stable release of Debian on the Mini PC, and a typical 64-bit version of Raspian on the Pi.

In order to make sure network configurations worked properly, each machine is given a static IP address, either through `dhcpcd` or through DHCP reservations on my router. Once everything was set up and I confirmed I could SSH into each machine, I SSH hardened them by disabling password logins, enabling public/private key sign in, and changing the port that the SSH server is listening for connections on.

I also had to go into my router's browser interface in order to set a custom entry for local DNS, so that it would route DNS queries to my Pi instead of whatever the router's defaults were.

I considered making my services public on an actual Internet domain and just gating them all behind login portals or other authentication methods, but in the end I felt it was easier (and far more secure) to just leave everything local-only, so a user would need to VPN into my home network in order to access any services or machines. This decision would end up making some things much easier, and other things much more difficult.

Lessons Learned

One thing that was made easier by keeping things local was the DNS entries for my named services. By using Pi-hole and Nginx Proxy Manager it was dead simple to set up pretty domain names using CNAME entries and the reverse proxy.

One thing that was made far harder was SSL certificates. If I had exposed my services to the Internet I could have used the built in Lets Encrypt functionality of Nginx to create my certs, but because I was local only, I ended up having to self-sign my certs, including creating a local certificate authority. That authority has to then be uploaded into any device that wants to authenticate the validity of those SSL certs. Bit of a pain to set up, but once I got everything working it seems to be very smooth sailing.

Besides the SSL certs there were some other tempermental integrations, such as getting OnlyOffice working inside of Nextcloud (which prompted me to completely restructure the internal Docker network that connected all my containers), getting the VPN to work with my dynamic IP through duckdns, and trying to figure out which services required websocket support through the reverse proxy, among others.

Future Plans

There's still a lot that I need to do with this homelab, such as regular backups, setting up a NAS, creating an admin dashboard or homepage of some kind, system monitoring with Prometheus/Grafana, messing with firewall rules, and perhaps even playing around with adding a Windows machine to the network with Parsec for some sort of cloud gaming setup.

I'm already planning on adding a second Mini PC to the network in order to act as a squeezebox player in my audio setup, as well as split some of the load with the current Mini PC. Some services that don't really need a fast ethernet connection could be moved over to the new machine that uses Wi-Fi, which should help with any computational load issues that might arise.

There's also a lot more fine-tuning I want to do with the existing infrastructure, such as adding to and improving my Home Assistant stuff, organizing my Nextcloud stuff, putting all my Docker files and other configurations into a private GitHub repo, etc.

Conclusion

It's been very fun, educating, and rewarding to self-host more and more of my stuff. It's made me feel a better sense of ownership over those things, which has made me cherish them more.

I would absolutely recommend you start your own homelab if this is something that interests you. Even if it's just a single Raspberry Pi or an old laptop or salvaged e-waste parts, you can do quite a lot with just a little bit of relatively inexpensive hardware.

Hopefully you enjoyed reading my ramblings about homelabs and self-hosting. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some Docker containers to play around with.

Happy homelabbing!

Quite a while ago, and many iterations of this website previous, I made a blog post about the concept of digital gardening, and what it means to me to care for and maintain digital systems. In light of a renewed interest in the upkeep and proliferation of content on this site, as well as a newfound interest in the smaller corners of the internet, I'd like to talk more about that.

Digital Gardening

Over the years I have spent countless hours practicing the art of digital gardening in one way or another. I maintain Linux systems as my daily drivers, I write custom scripts for installing and customizing my preferred environments, I work on new and existing integration software for a myriad of systems and vendors at work, and I serve as the sole webmaster of a personal website that functions as a confluence point for all my hobbies and other digital existences.

I've found that the process of cultivating these environments has brought me feelings of pride, patience, and peace. It is a Zen practice like any form of meditation. Perhaps I have a binary thumb, you could say.

Operating Systems

In the past I've used various Linux distributions including multiple flavors of Debian/Ubuntu, and those kinds of out-of-the-box environments are a great gateway into the world of free and open source operating systems, but these days I'm very content with my minimal Gentoo systems.

I like to work in the terminal whenever reasonable, so vim, tmux, and i3 are my best friends. I've made plenty of my own tools for the terminal in order to further enhance my workflow and quality of life on these systems that I adore so much, such as:

• A command line id3 tag editor for mp3 files (kiln)
• A TUI controller for Logitech Media Server (horizon)
• A TUI kanban task tracker (kadai)
• A customizable sand timer for the terminal (silica)
• Plenty more scripts and tools that I had a lot of fun making

When you use an OS like Windows, you sacrifice so much of what should make an OS fun and easy to work with. Don't get me wrong -- Windows is very convenient, and I still use it to this day for games that I can't run on Linux, but that convenience is not exactly equivalent with the 'ease' that I speak of. Forced updates at bad times, sudden restarts, bloatware, constant pings and system messages about absolutely nothing of any real value, limited customization and extensibility, piss poor development tools outside of those half-measure "crossplatform" environments that seek to placate every developer at once.

With Gentoo I pick the plot of land, choose the soil, build the beds and trellises, plant the seeds, and care for all of it on my own time. I reap what I sow, and I have eaten well for many harvest seasons.

Scripts

With a system as minimal and extensible as Gentoo, I've gone out of my way to add and customize many things to suit my needs, much of it set up or controlled by a suite of bash scripts.

I've got scripts that:

• Manage system-wide color schemes on the fly
• Mount remote drives and attached devices
• Add custom information to polybar
• Manage system controls with dmenu
• Open VPN connections
• Present slideshows in the terminal
• Run music clients that query my home music server
• ...and more!

These bash scripts and other configuration files need to be wrangled and managed in some sane manner, so I copied some ideas from this repo when deciding on what kind of infrastructure should handle this task. Everything is organized according to this structure, checked against shellcheck, and tailored toward my personal system in a way that allows for easy post-installation configuration when I spin up a new Gentoo box.

For work, things are a bit different. I still use Gentoo on my work machine, but the scripts that I'm working with aren't always mine. Even the ones that are fully mine have to contend with outside influences on style, purpose, language, conventions, etc.

I work in IT in higher education, so much of what I do is either integrating vendor software into our existing systems, or creating an in-house tool for one of our functional offices. A lot of it is database work, and I'm no SQL wizard, so queries can get a little messier than I would normally be comfortable with in my personal scripts. This is okay; a little bit of messy code here and there is a fact of life, and worrying about it will only keep you from improving as a programmer. That doesn't mean you can write shitty code all willy-nilly, just that you shouldn't be so puritanical about eradicating anything that doesn't meet your impossibly high standards.

I try my best to adhere to the same best practices that I do in my personal scripts, but when things require a different approach at work, I let those requirements guide me instead of my preferences. I still find my work fun and rewarding, so I must be doing something right.

Digital Spaces

When it comes to curating my own digital spaces beyond the foundation of an OS, I've had a history of moving away from social media, and trending toward more personal and intimate forms of self-expression and representation. I abandoned Facebook very quickly after creating my account, and over the years I've done less and less posting on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Today I really only use them to see what friends are up to, or to follow announcements from various bands that I like. The personal website feels like a much more effective means of expressing who I am over time.

So when I maintain this site, I take it very seriously. I want it to be as good a reflection of my self as possible. I want it to look good, feel good to navigate, contain good content, and leave any visitors with a good impression of me. As a programmer, that also applies to my source code. If anyone wants to trawl through the GitHub repo for this site to see how it works, I want them to walk away feeling like I have done things efficiently, elegantly, and practically. I want them to know how serious I am about what I preach here.

So I like to leverage the power of Jekyll's static site generation with Liquid and YAML, as well as make my front-end life easier with a CSS preprocessor like SASS. I want to make maintaining this site easier for me, because the easier it is, the more likely I'll be to add to it in the future.

And as I've gone through this latest iteration of site overhauls and philosophical questions about why I'm doing this, I've stumbled across many other people who seem to have similar ideas about the current state of social media and the web. So let's talk about the Personal Web.

The Personal Web

I've always had a fascination with digital spaces that you can call your own. Before I made this site I had a stint on the gophernet via the SDF Pubnix System. That was my first foray into a more personal expression of my online presence. For other people, they may have used more visually-expressive mediums like WYSIWYG site builders, or gone totally independent with self-hosted servers. But I think a lot of us did what we did out of a shared sentiment: The web is ugly, slow, and hostile to people like us.

Post-Web 1.0 Disillusionment

With the rise of Web 2.0 around the mid-2000's, the strange and fantastical internet of the late 90's was quickly being replaced with corporate no-man's-lands. Ads multiplied across pages, there was mass proliferation of external applications and complex Javascript, and things began to move to a slower and more inconvenient cloud-based architecture as companies figured out they could make bank in the process.

The era of the Web 1.0 static site was coming to an end. As I got older, I slowly became more and more disillusioned with how slow, bloated, and monotonous the internet had become. It's become a chore to surf the web, which is a damn shame.

Now Web 3.0 is peeking its head over the burning horizon of the future, and the phrase "web technologies" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I want to see a more personal internet resurface, one that brings people closer together, not isolates them further.

Neocities and Webrings

And so I stumbled upon this recent resurgence of Web 1.0 style personal sites, driven mostly by neocities. I was enthralled when I found this new vast community of people that wanted exactly what I had been yearning for.

In searching through endless sites plastered with buttons and sparkles and blog posts and artwork and unending creativity, I discovered the revival of a classic Web 1.0 social tool: the Webring.

Suddenly, the idea of finding a shared community online doesn't seem so far away. Everyone has pasted towering lists of rings on their pages, linking this way and that across an ocean of interests, hobbies, philosophies, and other niches.

You can find a nifty graph of tools and other resources for the personal web here.

The Path Forward

In discovering this wave of "Neo-Web 1.0" interest, it's spawned the very same interest in me. I've already got this site, so I might as well join in on the fun, right?

As of me writing this blog post, I am not currently part of any webrings or online communities of the personal web. But I'm certainly not opposed to the idea of joining one, or even starting my own. It seems that the vast majority of existing webrings are pretty sparse, only boasting 5-10 members, which certainly isn't a bad thing. I suppose I just haven't found a ring that really speaks to me and my perceived community.

Perhaps when you're reading this, you'll notice some webring links on the page, and you'll know that I've found my place in this new-old internet that we so desperately need today. Until then, I'll keep hoping and working toward making that kind of space for myself.

I'll keep practicing my Zen and tending to my garden.

When I was very young, I didn't know how to shut up.

People would constantly have to tell me to stop talking, and eventually I learned my lesson. I started talking less, and decided to expend that boundless energy on creative pursuits. I would hole myself up in my room and invent games, write stories and poetry, draw pictures, explore an endless tide of interests.

Most of those interests have faded into the background, or disappeared entirely. But I do find myself in my mid-twenties still clutching to those primal creative desires to make music, write poetry and prose, and create something interesting and worthwhile. However, recently those desires have not seemed so primal, so urgent.

It used to be that I couldn't help myself from spewing all manner of words into thousands of poems, or composing every melody that got stuck in my head into a song. I would release hours of music a year, or self-publish a collection of poetry at the same steady pace; now it's been months since I've shown any signs of life on my Youtube channel, or written a poem any longer than a Tanka. Past attempts at writing blog posts with any consistent schedule have all inevitably failed.

I alluded to this feeling of silence, or stagnation, in the foreword to my last poetry collection, "Even If I Am Ash", as it was released nearly three whole years after the previous collection. I don't like the feeling of being in this perpetual dry creative season. I find it difficult to scrounge up the motivation to write more than a few lines of poetry at a time, as I feel I simply have less to say without repeating myself. I find it difficult to sit at my desk and make music without struggling to land on a worthwhile idea or sound.

This second case is especially frustrating for me right now, as I'm coming up on a self-imposed deadline to release the next Maps of Low Fidelity album by the end of September. As of the time of writing this blog post, I only have an early version of a single track recorded, and it's the first recorded music I've made in months.

I think part of this problem is the strange sense of dread it creates in me, that I'm slowly drying up creatively, and will soon cease to create anything else worth seeing the light of day.

But I also think this line of reasoning is a bit dramatic, and could use some perspective from the world of reality. I've got more going on in my life now than I ever have in the past, I've got a better grasp of what is worth sharing and what is worth leaving on the cutting room floor, and I've been enjoying the peace of mind that comes with simple -- and wordless -- appreciation of the world around me.

These things forge a creative silence in my life, but what fills that silence is not death, or anything so dramatic. It's life, all that other stuff that goes on outside of my music and poetry. I have a job to do, bills to pay, relationships to tend to, and life skills to acquire and hone.

So here are some ideas I'd like to implement going forward that will hopefully help my mindset when it comes to my creative ventures:

• Quality > Quantity.
• Deadlines force creative approaches to solving blockages. Use them to your advantage, not to your mental detriment.
• Comparison will only destroy motivation. If what you create is true to yourself and resonates with your current situation, then it is good. It is enough.
• If the process is no longer enjoyable, then change the process. If no process is enjoyable, then perhaps you should think about whether you actually like what you are doing, and whether it is worth your time/effort.
• Not everything should be intended for other eyes/ears. Some things are just for you, and that's okay. If you go into every fresh idea with the thought that other people will be making judgements against it, then you will never be free enough to create what you want to create.

These are things I want to keep in mind for the future, so that hopefully I can create more things that people will resonate with and enjoy. I want to get back into the habit of having fun making music and poetry. I want to write more blog posts about random interests when the thought arises. I want to feel that same primal creative desire I did when I was 10, and 20, and I want to feel it still when I am 30 and beyond.

Perhaps you can apply some of these thoughts to make something you find compelling as well. Thanks for reading.