homelab
currently building a homelab with 5 mini japanese computers (nec mate mc 5), running 5 kubernetes nodes, with around 80tb of physical storage.
the idea is simple: own more of my digital life. music, videos, podcasts, audiobooks, pictures, backups, experiments, automation, and all the boring infrastructure that makes a personal setup feel independent.
what i want to run
- music: self-hosted spotify-like streaming for my music library
- videos: a personal media server for movies, shows, documentaries, youtube archives and recordings
- podcasts: automatic download, archive and sync across devices
- audiobooks: a clean library with progress sync
- pictures: private photo backup, albums and search
- files: personal cloud storage instead of depending only on google drive or icloud
- backups: automatic backups for laptops, phones, servers and important configs
- notes: synced notes, documents and personal wiki
- rss: a private feed reader and article archive
- read-it-later: saving useful pages before they disappear
- anki: self-hosted sync for decks and reviews
- git: private repositories and mirrors of projects i care about
- vpn: secure access to the homelab from outside
- dns: local dns, ad blocking and cleaner network rules
- monitoring: dashboards for cpu, ram, disks, network, temperature and uptime
- alerts: notifications when a disk, node or service has a problem
- automation: scheduled jobs for downloads, backups, cleanup and sync
- home dashboard: one page to see services, status and links
- dev environments: disposable containers for testing tools and projects
- kubernetes practice: learning deployments, ingress, storage, secrets, networking and observability
- storage experiments: testing raid, zfs, snapshots, replication and cold backups
- security practice: firewall rules, ssh hardening, secrets management and least privilege
- local ai: running small models, transcription, summarization and private search
- archive: keeping copies of books, manuals, websites, videos and files that matter to me
why
i like the idea of having a personal datacenter at home. because it gives me control, unlimited access to all the content in the world for free, forces me to learn, and turns infrastructure into something tangible.