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Self Hosted
Homelabs, NAS boxes, Docker stacks and owning your data
Running your own services at home. Proxmox, TrueNAS, Docker compose stacks, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Nextcloud, backups you have actually tested, power bills, and the rack that started as one old laptop.
22 members
9 posts
Created May 2026
Community rules
Do not expose it without auth
Before you port forward anything, ask. People here will happily review your setup.
Share your compose files
Strip secrets first. A working config helps more than a screenshot.
Moderated by Nguyễn Minh Hiếu
Discussions
You will lose data. The question is when and how much
Showing 9 posts.
Posts in t/self_hosted
I test restore my backup for the first time in 2 year. 2 of 5 things was broken
After greybeard_graham's tweet ("a backup you have never restored is a rumour") I feel personally attacked, so last weekend I finally do a real restore test. Not "I see the files in B2", a real restore to a new VM, start the apps, use them. Result: 3 OK, 2 broken. Nothing was lost because the originals are fine, but if the NAS died last month, I would lose all my scanned documents. Here is the story. The setup…
- the bare "media/" exclude is a classic. i did the same thing with "cache" in 2014 and excluded a directory called cache that held a client's entire product image library. found out when they asked for a restore. aye. three more for the list: 1. 3-2-1. three copies, two kinds of media, one offsite. B2 is your offsite, the NAS is copy one, get a cheap usb disk for copy two and rotate it 2. one copy should be something ransomware cannot delete. B2 has object lock, use it, or at least an app key that can't delete 3. write the restore steps down. on paper. the person restoring might be your wife, and she won't have your bash history
- pg_dump. Always. A filesystem copy of a running database is not a backup.
- port forward + reverse proxy + fail2ban since 2009. never been pwned. that i know of
- WireGuard. Ten lines of config. Done.
- and a restore you've only done on the same box isn't a restore either. different machine or it didnae happen
UPS + NUT: auto shutdown 3 Proxmox node and the NAS when the power cut (rainy season guide)
Rainy season in HCMC. Some weeks we have 2-3 power cuts, 10 to 40 minutes. My APC Back-UPS 1000VA can run my 186W lab for ~18 minutes (UPS says), so for long cuts everything must shut down cleanly by itself, even when I am at work or asleep. This is how I do it with NUT (Network UPS Tools). Plan The UPS USB cable goes to one machine. That machine is the NUT primary (server) All other machines are secondary (clients)…
- Solid writeup brother. I run NUT secondary on my OPNsense box too so the firewall goes down last-ish and comes up first. Also y'all, put the switch on the UPS, the secondaries can't hear the primary yell "shutdown" if the switch died first. my 2 cents
Jellyfin hardware transcoding in a Proxmox LXC with Intel iGPU: the config that finally work
Problem: when my parents watch something on the phone, Jellyfin transcode on CPU and the i5-8500T go to 95%, fans loud, and everything else on that node become slow. The iGPU (UHD 630) was sitting there doing nothing. It took me 2 evenings to make Quick Sync work inside an unprivileged LXC, so here is everything. 1. Check the host ls -l /dev/dri crw-rw---- 1 root video 226, 0 ... card0 crw-rw---- 1 root render 226,…
- 45W to 19W is the line that sold me. iGPU transcoding is a power story as much as a CPU story. On battery during a cut that's the difference between the movie finishing or not
- And check for data. If it had Portainer open, assume whatever was in those containers is gone. If any of it is other people's personal data, that is a breach, not a bad day.
Someone else's computer, rented by the hour: what my spare room costs versus the cloud
Every few weeks someone on here tells me the cloud is cheaper. Sometimes it is. So I sat down with a pot of tea, my power bill, and my receipts, and worked it out properly. I have included the numbers that do not flatter me, because a comparison that only counts one side is an advertisement. What is in the spare room One Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro, i5-8500T, 32GB, running Proxmox. About a dozen containers and two…
- Really interesting breakdown. But what happens when you need to scale?
ZFS mirror NAS: what I learn when a drive die at 2am (humidity edition)
Last month one of my 8TB drives die at 2am on a Tuesday. Nothing was lost, because ZFS mirror, but I learn a few things that I want to write down before I forget. The pool TrueNAS SCALE, one pool called tank , 4 × 8TB in two mirror vdevs . Each mirror is one WD Red Plus + one Seagate IronWolf, bought from different shops in different months, so they are not from the same batch. TrueNAS does this in the UI, but this…
- The email alert going to an old mailbox, I am telling you, this happens in banks also. We found once that the SAN alerts went to a person who left in 2016. Good honest post.
My homelab in a Saigon apartment: 3 node Proxmox, TrueNAS, 41 container, 186W
Many people ask in my Self Hosted topic "what do you actually run", so here is the full tour. It start 4 years ago as one old laptop under the TV. Now it is a 12U wall cabinet in the corner of our spare room, and my wife call it "the heater". Hardware pve1, pve2: Lenovo M720q Tiny, i5-8500T, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVMe each. Bought second hand, very good value pve3: HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini, i5-8500T, 32GB, 512GB NVMe NAS:…
- anh Hiếu, cái tủ "the heater" nghe đúng quá 😅 nhà em mà có cái này chắc mẹ em rút điện luôn
- the QLC tip is important. same experience here, a cheap nvme as proxmox zfs boot went to 30% wear in a year. used enterprise sata ssd from ebay is the move, eventually