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.
I understood some of those words. It make network go?
It make network go very good.
Went to try pfSense. Need to register to their shop to buy a free download link.
Then during installation it won’t install unless it can phone home and report.
OpnSense all the way.
That’s new, it didn’t used to do that back in the days when I used it but that was a couple years ago. Sounds like it’s just getting worse.
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/
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?
Thanks for that info, @AtariDump@lemmy.world
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.
I’m still using pfsense and considered switching over to opnsense but I found out it doesn’t have something similar to pfblocker.
How many NICs do you have on your opnsense machine?
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.
No one’s mentioned Forgejo yet? Solid git and artifact repository.
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Samba (I can move files now, sweet!)
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Jellyfin (I can watch stuff, sweet!)
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Qbittorrent-wireguard (for pirating copyrighted material from the internet illegally)
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Somesuch Wireguard solution (for accessing the backend and doin stuff)
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A proxy somewhere else
The rest is extra. This gets my usual goals completed pretty well.
for pirating copyrighted material from the internet illegally
I’m pretty sure that’s not the phase we use now
“Archiving legally purchased content as an insurance against corporate-sanctioned theft”?
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Paperless-ngx
The rest is already in the other comments
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.
+1 for UptimeKuma. Works great.
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?
I had to create an account as per the usual process for these types of apps, but it was all local. I never had to do one to connect to their servers. I know it generates a unique instance ID which I believe phones home to their servers but I don’t mind personally.
As for my experience, a lot of it is locked behind their paid plans, so I just keep it limited to what I use which is fine. I do like it as it does better than NocoDB for my needs (the input forms is what I needed) and it does better there. I don’t recall the other reasons for not using NocoDB otherwise, but it’s a long while.
Their pricing is here: https://baserow.io/pricing
So, that’s mostly what is locked behind. My sleep form I built which feeds the database:
Overall, it does meet my needs so that’s all I ask. :)
Does Technitium support DNS rewrites like Adguard Home?
I’m about 99% sure it does, I don’t use it that way but It does allow DNS zones. For example:
It’s a lot more technical then Adguard Home for sure. Both work just fine though, I came from Adguard Home as I use a PXE server to provision some of my devices and Technitium is super easy to configure that.
- Pihole (if that service goes down, everyone in my house gets mad at me)
- Jellyfin
Everything else is a nice to have, not essential
The arr family with a torrent client is great for feeding Jellyfin. If you are a developer, you can host your own shit there too. Game servers for playing with family and friends (so far Minecraft, Terraria, Project Zomboid, V Rising). I like to host a bunch of different telegram bots I wrote for fun. Discord bots are another interesting side. I also run some automation runners for helping out with testing, building and deploying my projects.
Focus on your needs and what you want to improve of your online life, there is probably a project you can self host for it.
(if that service goes down, everyone in my house gets mad at me)
I bought a PiZero and set it up as a redundant pihole for this reason. It’s slower because it’s wireless, but not super noticeable since it’s ‘just’ DNS. I have the router pointed at the main and backup all the time and if I need to do something (or break the main one messing with dockers) there’s still the backup until I get the main up.
I messed around with some High Availability configs where they both had the ‘same’ ip but could never get it working smoothly. I just use the teleporter functionality within pihole any time I update anything to keep them in sync, which is rare.
I did something similar, but then I turned my pizero in a portable retro console lol.
Opnsense
Vaultwarden
Email
Home assistant
Emby
Gitea
Paperless-ngx
Firefox
Honest question, I’d love to host email but it seems like a huge pain in the ass these days with trying to keep from being delisted. Is there a decent, home user accessible email system that’s useable out there?
A decade ago it was easy and doable but even in professional life I don’t deal with email backend anymore, all google or o365.
Highly recommend purelymail. No nonsense mail, with straight forward pricing.
I use an SMTP Relay for sending mail, so I don’t hit issues with sending.
You’ll never get away from maintenance for ant service you host, and you need a VPS at a minimum to handle mail unless your ISP allows it (which they probably don’t). There’s going to be front loading needed in order to make sure the IP you’re given isn’t on blocklists, and you’ll need to take appropriate measures with Apple, M$, Google, Yahoo, etc in order to send email to their domains. The good thing is that I’ve you do that, you’ll never need to touch it again.
I personally use iRedMail because of the breadth of documentation, but mailcow and others like that are allegedly nice. I prefer the omnibus solutions because I don’t care to do manual service configuration if it’s not necessary.
Been doing email hosting for my domain for 25 years, 12 years with iRedMail.
I’m also using iredmail. Apart from it needing more hardware than it used to its been pretty stable. I use an SMTP Relay for sending mail, so I don’t hit issues with sending. Not that I ever actually send many emails.
Firefox
You mean you self-host your profile?
No. I host Firefox that runs in a browser.
It’s one of my favourite things. So places that may block certain sites can be bypassed.
Not sure why I was downvoted for answering a question accurately.
How do you self host Firefox? This is something I’d like to setup!
It’s this: https://github.com/jlesage/docker-firefox
Pi-hole. Get rid of at least some ads on the network level. Maybe add unbound for a faster DNS response.
I like AdGuard Home myself.
Using unbound on opnSense with blacklists. Works wonders and do not require an additional device.
I use unbound with pi-hole inside an Ubuntu lxc container. No additional device needed.
Pi-hole can run inside a docker container no problem. In fact I have it running on my unraid server that way.
I keep one in a docker container and one in an actual pi, that way I can perform updates and upgrades without interrupting DNS service at the house.
This is the way.
For me:
- Card/CalDAV baikal : so that I can sync my calendar and address book across phone, tablet, workstation, and laptop
- Messaging prosody/synapse : private chatting with family.
- File sync Nextcloud : for access to various files. This is the only one that has worked consistently for me. Syncthing et al would constantly lose connection and the file I needed wouldn’t be there. Works fantastic for syncing Joplin notes.
- VPN wireguard : to access things remotely and securely
- Audiobooks audiobooksheld : I have a ridiculously large audio book library and enjoy listening to them when driving. This way I don’t have to preload my phone.
- Ebooks calibreweb : another large library. I have separate instances for different types: Magazines, regular books, RPG/gamebooks.
- Version control forgejo : for coding and creative writing projects.
- bookmarks shaarli : I find myself using this less and less. I use Firefox’s built-in sync, so I’m thinking about switching to separating selfhosting that instead of shaarli.
- Photos Synology : looking forward to immich getting stable. Once they get past regular breathing changes I’ll move over to that.
I have stopped using most of the services that got me into selfhosting. Things like rss and wikis. I try new things from time to time but kill them if I don’t find myself using them regularly or if the maintenance cost is more than the value add.
where do you source your magazines from out of interest? Are they epubs etc?
vaultwarden, jellyfin, freshrss, nextcloud, and wireguard
How is fressrss?
I am also running readarr and bookshelf
It’s perfect, better with themes
Any themes you specifically recommend? I just use native apps on my phone and laptop, but it would be nice to improve the theme when I administrate.
I’m using Mapco now but was previously using Swage. There are 11 options. Just fun to switch it up! I’m sure you can make your own as well but the options are an attractive change :)
I used freshrss for quite some time, but the themes always looked a bit “off” for me. Went to miniflux and its awesome in its minimalism.
No one metioned https://hoarder.app/ - bookmark app featuring offline archive, full text search and AI auto tagging
Nextcloud for sure.
A reverse proxy, in my case Caddy.
How did you set up you SSL certificates, are you using a self signed certificate or do you use a custom subdomain?
Caddy automatically sets up certificates for you. Since I don’t want my subdomain to appear in certificate transparency logs, I use a wildcard certificate which requires using a plugin for my DNS provider.
Thanks, that sounds good. Can you explain more how you used the plugin for the wildcard certificate?
To get a TLS certificate from Let’s Encrypt, they need to verify that you are in control of your domain. For regular domains, this can be done via HTTP, for wildcard certificates they require you to create a DNS record with a special token to verify ownership of the domain.
This means that in order to automatically obtain a TLS certificate, caddy needs to interact with the API of your domain registrar to set up this record. Since there are many different providers, this isn’t built into caddy itself and you require a version that includes the corresponding caddy-dns module. Caddy modules need to compiled into the binary, so it’s not always trivial to set up (in my case I have a systemd timer that rebuilds a local container image whenever a new version of the docker.io/caddy:builder image is available).
Duh, you need a reverse proxy to host most of the stuff (if you want to run more than 1 service and use HTTPS). I use Traefik btw, though I heard Caddy is very easy to use.
Depends on what your usecase is for what is “essential.”
I think keeping household documents, taxes, medical bills, etc… In a local only paperless-ngx instance is quite essential to the organization of a household where everything is searchable and able to be organized on multiple levels compared to a simple document folder on 1 computer.
Having a document or self-hosted wiki with an in - case - of - death document that gets backed up in an encrypted, but accessible by family place is probably the most “essential” thing.