Beginnings of the Homelab

In late 2022 I started moving away from proprietary cloud software and relying more on my own infrastructure. Things started simply enough: a headless Raspberry Pi with an external harddrive connected to my router. I used Tasker to setup automation on my and my wife’s phones so that every night all of the photos we had taken that day (having twin toddlers means there are a lot of photos) are backed up to the harddrive and made available to browse and view instantly via a media server we can access from any of our devices.

Since then the server has expanded as I have learned about containerization with Docker, MariaDB databases, CalDAV & CardDAV servers, OPDS protocol, VPN tunnels, DNS record management, network monitoring, and more.

I’ve been rethinking my backup strategy and I’ve outgrown the Raspberry Pi, so I’m currently in the process of building a compact DIY NAS based around an inexpensive Jasper Lake motherboard which will be operating TrueNAS Scale with RAID 5 parity. I’ll then be converting the Raspberry Pi into a dedicated DNS server and ad-blocker with future plans of integrating a pfSense box into the setup.

( this page is currently under construction )