FB Posting on Aug 8th 2025

Stardate 2025.08.08 – Mission Log: Operation Homelab – Status: Mostly Operational (Don’t Tell My ISP)

Alright, folks, buckle up. It’s been a wild ride, fueled by YouTube tutorials, copious amounts of orange juice / soyabean milk (I don’t do caffeine), and a frankly alarming number of trial-and-error installations. Let’s just say my router has seen more action than a Starship.

After months of research – primarily involving frantic scrolling through tech blogs and a string of reverse proxy failures – I’ve finally managed to get a few key systems running. I’m talking an Ollama/OpenWebUI setup loaded with a curated list of AI models (basically, I’m running a digital hive mind), a n8n workflow desk that’s trying to organize my life (it’s currently arguing with me), and a file server that… well, let’s just say I’m cautiously optimistic. All served from my own little private self-hosted fortress – couple of NAS servers, network switches, wifi routers, media devices all supported by a 2.5Gb/10Gb wired network. You know, just in case I need to download a really big image of a cat.

Most of my time and disposable income went into building my DIY NAS servers. Honestly, it was a welcome change from assembling desktop PCs. It involved a deep dive into VMs, hypervisors, and a surprisingly intense debate about the merits of Proxmox versus TrueNAS. I’m pretty sure the TrueNAS documentation is actively trying to drive me insane.

Then the AI chatbot craze hit. Suddenly, everyone’s talking about self-hosted AI. It was like bees to honey! So I dove headfirst into the deep end of researching Docker, Ollama, OpenWebUI, and a whole lot of acronyms. But I still needed a way to put all these services securely online for daily access via public Internet, and that means punching ‘holes’ thru firewalls to get into my internal servers.

The selection process to find that way was a tough gauntlet! I tried and tested everything: From Ngrok to Tailscale, Apache, HAProxy, Nginx, Traefik, Caddy, and finally, I landed on Pangolin during its beta. It was a bit rough around the edges at first, but two months of iterations since its quiet release, it became surprisingly slick, fast, and reliable. I’m starting to think I might actually be a competent homelab operator.

Looking ahead, I’m contemplating on replacing FileServer with Nextcloud because, let’s be honest, I need a better way to manage my documents. And, I’m also on the hunt for a viable ClickUp alternative. Plane or OpenProject are contenders – but I might end up spending a whole afternoon wrestling with configuration files.

For now, though, I’ll leave that for another time. Mission logs will continue…

May the circuits be with you.