What's Running in My Homelab
I have a problem. It started with a NAS and a spare PC, and at some point it turned into a small data center in my house that I have to think about regularly. My wife is very patient.
Here’s what I’m actually running, and roughly why.
The Hardware
The core is a Proxmox cluster handling virtualization. On top of that I’ve got an Unraid box named Tower that handles storage and media — it’s been the most stable thing in the whole setup, which is either a compliment to Unraid or an indictment of everything else.
The Docker host is where most containerized services live. Then there’s a dedicated Claude VM — Ubuntu 24.04, always on — that runs AI automation tasks around the clock. More on that in a minute because it’s the part I’m most proud of and also the part that would sound the most unhinged if I described it to a normal person.
There’s also a Postiz VM for social media scheduling, and a machine I call the NOMAD VM that runs a local copy of Wikipedia and survival documentation for internet-down scenarios. I built that one after a storm took out our connection for three days and I realized I had no idea how to do anything without a browser open.
Networking
All services live under *.endor.five30am.com — a subdomain I picked because it sounds like a Star Wars forest moon, which felt appropriate for something running in a closet. Nginx Proxy Manager handles reverse proxying, with a wildcard SSL cert provisioned via Cloudflare DNS challenge so everything gets HTTPS without me thinking about it.
Technitium is my internal DNS server. Tailscale gives me subnet routing for remote access — I can hit any internal address from anywhere, which was immediately useful and has occasionally been a liability when I’m on vacation and something breaks.
Authelia sits in front of most services as an SSO layer. It took me a weekend to get working correctly and I’ve been smug about it ever since.
The Services
The standard homelab stuff: Vaultwarden for password management (self-hosted Bitwarden), Paperless-ngx for document scanning and OCR, Mealie for recipe management, Homebox for home inventory, Portainer for container management, and n8n for automation workflows.
SearXNG is a self-hosted search aggregator — I use it when I don’t want my queries going straight to Google. It’s probably more paranoid than necessary but it’s fast and I like it.
Syncthing keeps my Obsidian vault synced between machines without routing through anyone’s cloud. It just works, quietly, which is exactly what you want from a sync tool.
Wazuh is my SIEM — security monitoring with 21 agents reporting in from across the network. It sends me alerts I don’t always understand but I feel better knowing it’s watching.
For the kids: a Minecraft server running Paper with Geyser and Floodgate for Bedrock crossplay. Java and Bedrock players on the same server simultaneously. It took longer to set up than I expected and my kids were unimpressed, which is the universal homelab experience.
The Part That Got Out of Hand
The Claude VM runs a fleet of 20-something AI agents on systemd timers. Every day they’re writing blog content, running SEO audits, tracking my health and finances, managing social media queues, and handling ops work across about a dozen websites I run.
I built a custom admin dashboard called the content-ops command center that ties everything together — kanban backlog, content calendar, social scheduling, finance tracking, SEO console. It’s the kind of thing you build when you have a problem and also enjoy building tools more than you should.
The agents post to Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram automatically. They submit new articles to Google’s Indexing API in batches. They write end-of-day journal entries that a review agent reads at 9pm to generate action items for the next day.
Is this a lot? Yes. Does it run while I’m asleep? Also yes.
The Honest Take
Running a homelab is mostly learning how things break, then learning how to make them break less. The services I use daily are reliable enough that I forget they’re self-hosted. The ones I rarely touch are usually fine until they’re suddenly not, at 11pm, when I have other things going on.
Would I recommend it? If you’re the kind of person who read this far and thought “that sounds fun” — yes. If you read this far and thought “that sounds exhausting” — also yes, and you’re not wrong.