Projects

I enjoy playing around with various technologies in my home lab, doing some casual programming, and generally just breaking things and fixing them. I guess this site counts as a side-project, with the caveat that I make no claims of being a web developer.

My Office Setup / Home Lab

Office Photo Box Photo

This is my current setup in my office. I've made an active effort to downsize everything as much as possible. Little heat, no noise. And my puppy Lou is always under my desk.

My Network Setup

My network runs through ATT fiber, with the 5Gb downlink configured in IP passthrough mode. CAT6 runs from the ATT fiber router downstairs to my office upstairs, connecting to my Protectli vault running pfSense over a WireGuard VPN.

pfSense Dashboard
Protectli Vault

Protectli Vault

Netgear Managed Switch

Netgear Managed Switch

Home Server & Services

My home server is an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini that I picked up for around $100 to replace my old, hot (and noisy) desktop server. I use a 2TB SSD, configured as an NFS, for machine backups and extra media storage.

NAS Photo HP Mini Server Photo

The server runs on a Fedora linux VM on top of proxmox. My home dashboard is configured with homarr. Its a great simple to use home dashboard with web GUI design customization (https://homarr.dev/). I don't have highly specific needs, so it saves me the time of having to hand-jam everything in a yaml file.

You can see the services I'm running below. It's pretty simple, and all are run in docker containers.
Dashboard Photo


I've gone through a bit of an evolution for my home services. Once upon a time, I had a mixture of multiple vms with services scattered between them. Over time I migrated to containers. I prefer not having to worry about interactions between services, and if something breaks, it breaks in a container and is a quick troubleshoot. I've used a mixture of Docker and Podman, Docker Compose for all the available libraries, and now manage all containers with portainer (https://www.portainer.io/). It's a great tool for managing containers, and I'm glad I switched. It has a great simple web GUI and keeps things nice and organized.


Portainer Photo


qBittorrent works well and Home Assistant covers all my home automation, though I did have to use integration for Samsung SmartThings to get around some issues integrating certain devices. I am slowly upgrading my IOT/smart home devices so I can have more granular control.


Last but not least, the most used service: Jellyfin. Easy to use open source media server. My Jellyfin server is connected to all my TVs and computers throughout my house. I used Plex for quite a while, but I really do prefer Jellyfin at this point. Simple, stable, and I've had better performance overall.


Jellyfin Photo