Immich/PhotoPrism/whatever you use for image backup. Cloud providers are snooping through your shit.
Plex/Jellyfin for streaming
Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, SABnzbd, qBittorrent to support the streaming service(s)
The only one I haven’t seen mentioned here that is a requirement for me is OPNsense. I’ve been using it for a couple years, and pfSense before that for a very long time. Never going back to commercial routers and their shitty / buggy / backdoored software. I highly recommend OPNsense over pfSense for the UI improvements alone, but there are other reasons to use/support OPNsense over pfSense.
On my network it handles internet firewall, internal firewall, and all routing across 5 VLANs and between two internet gateways. It does 1-1 NAT for my public IPs, inbound VPN, outbound VPN for my *arr stack, and RDNS blocklists with the data source being a script I wrote that merges from several sources and deduplicates the list. It is my internal certificate authority (I don’t miss you at all, Windows CA), DHCP for the guest wifi, and does pihole-like ad blocking via DNS for my entire network. And it does all that running in a VM with 2GB of RAM, of which it only uses about 60% on my install.
It is an incredibly powerful tool, not terribly difficult to learn, has a pretty damn good UI for FOSS, and in my opinion is a fantastic foundation for a complex home network / homelab. Unlike pfSense, which corrupted itself twice over the years I ran it, it has never let me down. And every update has been painless over the years.
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It’s a VM so technically none I guess, but my hypervisor hosts have a 4 port gigabit card and a 10 gig fiber card, plus another gigabit port on the motherboard.
OPNsense is using 6 interfaces, 2 WAN and 4 LAN, but it’s all virtualized.
I understood some of those words. It make network go?
It make network go very good.
I highly recommend OPNsense over pfSense for the UI improvements alone, but there are other reasons to use/support OPNsense over pfSense.
Can you list or summarize some of the other reasons?
Eh, I’ve forgotten a lot of the details and it’s drama that I don’t care to relearn about. Easy to find online with some basic searching if you want to read about it.
Second OPNsense. pfSense also is maintained by some pretty shitty individuals.
Yeah I hinted at it but didn’t feel like going into it. It’s why I switched though, and happily I found OPNsense to just be better anyway.
Why “shitty individuals”?
https://web.archive.org/web/20160314132836/http://www.opnsense.com/
This was the website that pfsense maintainers made as soon as OPNsense was announced. They sniped the name, derided the project and only ended up handing over the domain after they were legally compelled to.
One person affiliated with Netgate in particular can be seen around forums and social media and has serious axes to grind. He’s… not pleasant.
Add to that Netgate’s practices (IIRC secret proprietary blob required to build pfsense, double-check that fact / unremovable installation tracking) and the picture painted is one of petulance and anger.
[edit] oh yeah, and this gem! https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-license-violations-and-bad-code-freebsd-13s-close-call/
Jellyfin/Plex like many have mentioned.
I personally like Syncthing for petty much everything else. For general file syncing of course. But also with Joplin pointed to a synced directory for notes. With keepass as a password vault. With synced config directories for some apps across devices like newsboat for RSS, and neomutt for email. I also used to use it with rtorrent via a watch directory, though I currently am using a seedbox for that purpose.
VPN (openvpn/wireguard) is a good idea if you want to access your services outside your local network, without exposing them all globally.
I believe Syncthing has been discontinued unless someone else took up the project.
This is absolutely not the case.
That would suck if so since I obviously utilize it heavily but this doesn’t seem to be the case? Latest release was just a month ago and their github repo is active.
It doesn’t really look dead anywhere on their repo or website: https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing Or are there different things with the same name? :)
Syncthing discontinued its android app on the play store.
Pi-hole. Get rid of at least some ads on the network level. Maybe add unbound for a faster DNS response.
It’s not very exciting, but: Network UPS Tools (NUT).
Keep everything in good shape in the event of a power outage.
I use my searxng instance several times a day.
DNS server/cache/pihole. If that goes down I can’t browse anything.
I also selfhost a SaaS that I built. It’s essential to me that it’s available to my customers although I don’t use it personally.
vaultwarden, jellyfin, freshrss, nextcloud, and wireguard
- AdGuard home (usable also as private DNS on Android)
- JellyFin
- Homeassistant
No one’s mentioned Forgejo yet? Solid git and artifact repository.
WireGuard on my VPS, because otherwise I’m stuck behind CGNAT and can’t access anything in my network from elsewhere. Or Tailscale, but that’s not really self-hosted.
do you have a good guide on how it works/ho to set it up? I tried a little while ago but couldnt figure it out.
Some WebDAV server, can be Nextcloud but actually something more lightweight is better.
Also a XMPP server is very nice to have. Even if you don’t have many contacts on it (yet), it works very well has a notification service and can even be extended to act as a Unified Push distributor.
and can even be extended to act as a Unified Push distributor.
wait wait wait wait.
That works? Teach me how!
Radicale is next on my list
Paperless-ngx
The rest is already in the other comments
Nextcloud.
I was hosting nextcloud at home for years. Then when I worked in a Datacenter I got to host some servers there from free so I set up a two-node proxmox with nextcloud and some other stuff. Now I don’t work there anymore and I really felt the hole nextcloud left, no more notes syncing for notes, tasks, calendar, podcasts no more place to upload my photos from my phone … So now I’m hosting nextcloud at home again.
I also host jellyfin which is nice but if I don’t have it doesn’t actively hamper my workflow.
I used to have a Nextcloud instance on a shared webhost… It ran like shit but you can’t beat the storage space… VPS storage is expensive.
Now I use syncthing on my home server
In terms of most used for me, it would be:
- Nextcloud: contains my contacts, calendar, and photos synced with my phone, as well as access to files on my server from any web browser.
- Home assistant: both automated and remote control of your lights, thermostat, etc.
- Audiobookshelf: only really useful if you have an audiobook collection
- Vault Warden: self-hosted bitwarden. Not really all that important to self-host, since a bit warden’s clients are open source.
- Frigate: only useful if you have security cameras.
- Navidrome: only useful if you have a music collection.
- Jellyfin: only useful if you have a movie / TV collection.
Audiobookshelf also supports podcasts (and ebooks, but I haven’t tested that).
Podcasts are my primary use case (my partner uses audiobooks exclusively), and while it works rather well, I want to put in the caveat that there’s no working playlist functionality in the app, and IME headset controls don’t work from FF for Android.
That’s not a deal breaker for me, but it was a massive disappointment when I switched over. But the lack of playlist functionality in the app only annoys me when I want to follow one of the shorter news feeds, since I have to stop and select the next track every 5 min as the episode ends. No issue with that feed from the browser, so meh.
Works great through my reverse proxy/cloudflare tunnel setup, so not too many actual complaints.
There’s a player queue functionality (which works kind of like a playlist) but I don’t think it transfers across devices. But you can at least queue up a bunch of tracks on a device.
I’ve tried to use the playlist feature on my device a couple of times, but I still had to manually start the next episode. I might try again and see if I can figure it out.
Jellyfin is also useful for music collection. I tried both it and Navidrome to start with, and ended up only using Jellyfin.
Gonna also throw in: Nextcloud Memories.
It makes the photo organizing part of NextCloud AMAZING. I’m so happy I got to dump Google Photos for good.
In no particular order, the most essential ones are those I constantly use throughout my day and also weekly.
Proxmox holds all of these in different LXC’s and VM’s
- Home Assistant
- Pocket-ID - https://github.com/stonith404/pocket-id (Exclusive Passkey login system as in -no un/pw just your Passkey which - doubles as an OIDC provider)
- Homepage (By Ben Phelps of gethomepage.dev)
- Vaultwarden
- TechnitiumDNS which handles all of my DHCP and Adblocking in a one system, extremely capable software especially useful for SOHO too.
- Baserow - Airtable alternative. It holds certain items of importance like what MAC address each device in my home network holds and what IP It uses in an intelligent view. I also was using it for a while to log issues with my sleep where I deal with insomnia, so I logged how well I slept, how many times I woke up, how long it took me to fall asleep etc. That was a simple form I created using drag/drop in Baserow and called by a URL.
- OpenVSCode server - makes editing my Homepage (above) yaml and my docker-compose files a breeze! It’s especially nice when you edit it something and it auto saves almost instantly. Makes some of my services change in real-time!
- UptimeKuma - Simply one of the best out there for me
- Gotify - I get alerted to my Tuya based dehumidifer tank being full via Home Assistant, Downtime alerts from UptimeKuma and a variety of other services which I deem higher priority alerts over “fix when you can” ones.
Aside from that, i do have other services I use every so often like Memos, Joplin Server (holds most of my notes), Pingvin and a few others.
I tried Baserow a while ago but decided not to use it because it started downloading the application after running the container and required an online account (that could also be NocoDB). How has your experience been after using it for longer?
Does Technitium support DNS rewrites like Adguard Home?
