Discussion
State of Homelab 2026
ceinewydd: Looking forward to the follow up post, State of Bunker 2029.
nateberkopec: For secrets management, I basically just use fnox everywhere (https://fnox.jdx.dev/). It's a frontend to tons more options than sops, although `age` is still included. I also think the DX is better but to each their own.
jsphweid: This is not so much a fantasy about "being independent". Instead, it's a fantasy about being a sysadmin.
oofbaroomf: Seems like it's down right now. I guess that's the "State of Homelab"? :)
8cvor6j844qw_d6: Looks interesting, thanks for sharing. I am using SOPS, might be a good replacement.
arjie: Cloudflare Tunnel is a wonderful thing. In fact, Cloudflare itself is fantastic for homelabbers because it gives you so much for free. I used to just host direct on my own home IP, but nowadays I find it easier to just `cloudflared`. Don't have to worry about the firewall and any breaches into my network and all of that stuff.I started from a similar place as you and then eventually now my IaaC for my homelab is just idempotent bash scripts written by Claude. The pattern I find with dependencies is that they have the property that someone wants to change some attribute and so the program needs to evolve for the attribute to be changeable. This means programs evolve to have many hinges and the interactions cause bugs one cannot reason about.My needs for the homelab are fairly simple and the script can encode all the information it needs. As a human, writing such a script is tedious. As a human with an AI assistant, I've found that this is so much easier to worry about because bash is a fairly stable target.Anyway, apart from that, I landed on using systemd's containers that use podman but otherwise not too different. My (far less polished) version of this post as a memory aid to myself: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/One_Quick_Way_To_Host_A_WebA...
hombre_fatal: A good example of that is the guys on r/homelab explaining how they built a NAS so their wife could save her phone media without Google Photos.Man, paying Google/Apple $5/mo is surely a much better solution for her. And are you really doing 3-2-1 on that?Save the dicking around for your own stuff.
stratts: Both my wife and I are reluctant to upload our entire photo collection spanning 20+ years to the cloud. Immich has been working really well for us, the experience for her is just as seamless as it would be for Google Photos, I think.And at $180/yr for the 2TB of storage we'd need to pay for, vs. maybe $200 in hardware, it pays itself off pretty quickly... if you exclude the time spent setting it up and administering it. But I don't mind, it's a bit like digital gardening for me.
dugite-code: Except with modern tooling it's not a huge task anymore to run these services.Cost wise on the right hardware it is very cheap to run, add the privacy/personal control aspect it's no wonder so many people do it.
cadamsdotcom: There should be volunteer groups at local libraries running these services for their local communities.It’d be a great way for kids to learn to operate services and a great alternative for anyone who wants to use the fantastic open source stuff that’s out there but lacks expertise or time.