What’s in Our Home Lab

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we're talking all about HomeLabs and all of the stuff we are running on our personal networks and how we do it. My name is Scott Tolinski, and with me today is the perfect person for the job, CJ Reynolds. What's up, CJ? Not much. I'm excited to talk about this. I haven't... Like, I have so much to share, and I've never been able to... Or haven't had the chance to share it. So, yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited specifically because I know you're probably onto some stuff that I should be onto. In fact, when I was browsing the show notes, I was really interested in some of the things you had listed here. So I'm I'm pretty I'm pretty curious about some of your thoughts. So we're gonna get into everything from hardware to the software to the network stuff, NAS, home automation, media, anything that we're running. I I got a big old rack down here that I'm running all kinds of stuff in, and it's about to get even crazier for me once my new computer arrives. So let's get into it. First and foremost, what are we running in our home labs? Let's talk about hardware first, CJ. What do got? What are you working with?

Yeah. So this is my server rack that has my firewall, which we'll talk about in a bit, as well as a few machines.

In terms of hardware, like, I have a dedicated firewall box, which I'll talk about, a couple of switches, PoE switches. I've got my AI machine, which I've done a video on.

I have a a NAS that takes four hard disk drives. And this is not like a network RAID array. This is just like a hardware that holds onto those disks, then I plug it into a machine. And then I've got this little Beelink machine here, which takes six m dot two SSDs, and that's also... That's my NAS. And And then... So I kind of think of it as, like, my B Link is my cold... My hot storage. Like, that's where all my stuff I access that I need all the time. And then the RAID array is kind of like cold storage. I plug it in when I need it. Yeah. And then in terms of where I run most of my stuff, I have this Dell work... Dell Precision Workstation.

So this thing has two Xeon processors, both twenty eight four cores. So it's 48 cores, and it has a 128 gigabytes of DDR three RAM.

So I bought this about four years ago with plans to, like, do awesome stuff in my home lab, and then it sat on the shelf for, like, two years or, like, a year and a half. And then just this past Christmas, I started setting everything up. But this this machine is the the workhorse behind everything. So it's running Proxmox.

I've got five different virtual machines on it, and then each of those virtual machines have containers on them. But most of my services are running on this machine. I have this little Raspberry Pi three, and that is running one service. That's running my Vault Warden. So that has all of my passwords. It's my password Mhmm.

Lock. But my my thought was, like, when you're setting all this stuff up, if I were to put the password block, like, on... Or, like, the the the drive, you know, on this machine, and let's say this machine shuts down or something, how do I get access to my passwords? Yes.

So so that's why I'm like, okay. I need something tiny and dedicated, and I have so many Raspberry Pis that I have, like, nothing to do with. So this little Pi three, its sole job is to run Vault Warden, which is, like, the open source version of Bitwarden, holds all my passwords.

And then I've got one more py three that I'm setting up now that will be my proxy for everything, because we'll talk about in a second how we access all of our servers... Services. But right now, there's actually a virtual machine with a container inside of it, and that container is running Caddy, and that is how I get access to all of my services in an easy way.

But I want to make... Put that on a dedicated machine as well, because if this one goes down, then I can't access my services. Yeah.

So, yeah, I've got the server and then various other network stuff that we'll get into when we talk about network. But I would say this Dell workstation is kind of the the workhorse of my my whole hardware setup. Sick. Yeah.

I I love to see this. And and what what OS are you running on that bad boy?

Proxmox.

So Oh, Proxmox as an OS.

Is it always an OS? Because I... You... We're... We'll talk about that stuff later, but I I... I'm so willfully undereducated on Proxmox.

Definitely. And I mean, for for the the listener as well, if you're not familiar with it, Proxmox is a hypervisor operating system. So the idea is you install Proxmox just like you would a DBN or Ubuntu. It's your base operating system. And then they have a dashboard where you can manage all of your virtual machines.

So once you have it installed, it's just a web dashboard where you can see all of your VMs. You can go in, you can set their hardware and Cool. Everything And so... Yeah. This is like the...

If you were doing it directly on a laptop, you might use, like, VirtualBox or UTM. But Proxmox is the OS that basically lets you have lots of VMs, and they have several different things they provide. They also have Proxmox backup server. So you can have... And you can have, like, a cluster of Proxmox servers. So you technically could have multiple machines, each one running Proxmox, and then have a main dashboard where you can control virtual machines from from that spot. Yeah. Cool. To talk about the hardware as well, like, if you're getting into this, like, look for old server hardware. Like, look on GovDeals.

So this thing when I bought it was about $500.

I think now since everything's getting so expensive, like, even this machine might run for, like, 1,000.

But depending on how many cores you want and what else you're trying to do, like, you can find some cheaper ones. Like, if you just search for Dell Precision t fifty six ten on Amazon, They have some for, like, 300. It doesn't have 48 cores or a 120 gigabytes of RAM like mine does, but it is DDR three, so you could find some cheaper RAM and kind of, like, fill it out. Cool. Man, you... I knew your setup would be interesting.

Mine is different.

I will say that. Hear about it. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll just share a photo of my my rack here, guys. Don't demonetize us. I'm I'm showing off my rack. Okay. Here we go. And and if you're watching on audio, don't worry. Or listening on audio, I'll describe everything in here. So I have at the bottom, I have my Synology NAS. It's the DS 18 plus or 19 plus. It's kind of the classic four drive Synology NAS, which has We'll talk about our our network area storage in in more depth later, but it has 40 terabytes total across four drives.

A lot of storage there. I store a lot of media. I like... I'm a a hoarder in the sense that, like, I I I don't feel comfortable deleting any of my footage for some stupid Yeah.

I I take an enormous amount. Every single video I record with this camera is an outrageous size, so I I I gotta have all that space for my backups.

And then in this next row, which you see these little dots in here, this is actually a Mac mini.

It's an m two Mac mini, sadly with only eight gigs of RAM, and therefore, it is constantly struggling.

I will talk about what I run on it, but I I like managing Minecraft server for my kids on there. It's running as well as running a lot of internal services.

This big space right here is going to be my Mac Studio, which is a significant machine and will be arriving hopefully, at some point here. You know, it's funny. It says it's shipping November 12, and a lot of people have been getting theirs early, but sadly, mine has not budged.

That machine will be significant. So let me even pull up the specs on this thing while I'm looking here. So this is future network stuff. This will be my future workhorse and all kind of local inference machine and stuff. The version of the Mac Studio I got has two fifty six unified memory.

It has four terabytes of storage, and I maxed out on the processor. It's a 36 core m five ultra 80 core GPU and a 32 core neural engine.

It's going to be an absolute hoss. It's gonna do all kinds of crazy stuff. This photo doesn't show this, but this section right here is for Raspberry Pi and just in general clusters.

And so you can print these little, like, slide in things just to cluster your Raspberry Pis. And like you, CJ, I have a handful of Raspberry Pis. I have a three I'm not doing anything with. I have a four that's running Home Assistant, and I have a five that I'm still trying to figure out what to do with it. So the the five is going to be doing something here soon. And then I also currently have another slot taken up via a a four four terabyte SSD, just like a little four terabyte SSD that's hooked into the the Mac mini here.

And then I have my my network switch here, and that's pretty much what I'm running

for compute on this bad boy. Dope. This rack, I'll say, is... It it looks amazing, and it's fully three d printed. Right? It's like... So it's cool to see how it's all assembled because you have spots, I'm guessing, for, like, screws or Allen keys, but it's all,

like, PLU. Right? So the... Everything that is sturdy is Pet G. So Okay. The yellow bits that are just kind of decorative, even though they're handles, those are PLA, and then the rest of it is PET G. And I've heat sunk little, you know, brass nuts in there to then screw in the screws or whatever. I don't know if they're M5 or what, M6 screws into there. And let me tell you, one, this thing is sturdy as hell. So if you're thinking like a three d printed rack, no, this thing is crazy sturdy.

Man, it's heavy as hell. There's so much metal in here that are are just hardware stuff, but in the same time, I probably spent more money printing this thing than I would have just buying one off the rack given the amount of PLA and PETG I to use to... But the the thing about it that makes it better than just buying one off the rack is that I can print it to be the exact dimensions that I want. I mean, this thing fits perfectly under my desk. Every single component in my system fits perfectly in here. This Mac Studio shelf that I have for it was designed by me to take up the exact space and the exact everything and look that I wanted it to have. So, you can customize this thing to your heart's content. I even have a half a...

Was it a... Is it you? Just a half you? I haven't even heard... Yeah. I would say half you, but I haven't even heard that term before. But... Yeah. Yeah. It is it is a you here. And the reason why I have a half you that does nothing up here is because this really great Ethernet pass through is only Oh, yeah. Half u tall for some reason. Even... I mean, yeah, take up as little space as you need, but, like, so little things that are half u that is like, okay. I guess I gotta print a half u spacer in here just so there's not a giant gap in my rack. Yeah. I am going to print some mounts for the back. I have a bunch of fans, and then I will be printing sides to this thing. But I wanted to get it all set up before I just locked it down. Okay. It it was a it was a cool print. K s w two. KWS two. I think it's worth... Like, regardless of it being more expensive, like, it is worth it. Like, if if you compare Scott's photo to mine, like, mine's haphazardly stacked on top of each other and, like, it's not the perfect, like, width of everything. But, like, this looks Yeah.

So this looks good. Yeah. This is goals for sure. Yeah. Can we talk a bit about just, like, our hardware choices? Like, so when I was deciding and building out my home lab a while back, I looked into, like, actual server racks. Right? Because you can find old servers for fairly cheap.

But one thing you should really check out before you do that is watch a video on how how loud the fans are. So my my home lab is essentially silent even with the workstation. Like, sometimes the fans are spinning, but, like, you can't hear it unless you're, like, two or three feet away. But if you were to get, like, actual enterprise server software, the fans are so loud. I don't know if you've you've you've thought about that. Or Yeah. Well, I thought about that. I mean, one, all my all my computer is mostly Apple, and then I have some Raspberry Pi. So the Mac mini is silent. The Mac Studio is gonna be mostly silent, although I've heard that when you're really hammering it, the... These ones are... Get decently loud. The biggest the biggest noise that I have here is the NAS drive, which is noisy.

And it's not even the fans. It's like the drives are noisy. The the thing that is not pictured here is my audio interface, which seems stupid because it's a little computer and not not like a little whatever. It's a Neumann MT 48.

It does onboard DSP and stuff. So it it's...

It has a loud fan, believe it or not. So I'm, like, looking to, move that somewhere to get it away because... Yeah.

But that's the only noise I have really is the Synology, which has been surprisingly not bothersome.

I have all of my automations in terms of, like, data scrubbing and stuff on there. I have all of that running only overnight, so it won't it won't run during the day. Gotcha. Cool. Should we talk about network? Let's talk about network. Okay. So

I built a completely custom...

Not built. I didn't build it, but I bought a bare bones machine that's built for being a dedicated hardware firewall.

Oh. But this machine has four two point five gigabit Ethernet ports and then two SFP plus ports, plus, like, USB and and everything else. But the idea is you can run a dedicated firewall operating system on it, and this acts as your router and firewall. So, most people, I would say, that haven't looked into this probably just use the router that's given to them by their ISP or the modem, and then use... Maybe they plug a router into that. I started looking into this a lot, and one of the issues with the... Like, even the routers that you buy from Asus or TP Link or some of these other companies, they only upgrade the firmware every now and then. Right? Like, they... And then after a couple of years, that hardware, like, isn't... Doesn't stay up to date at all.

And so as we move into this world where everything is getting hacked and vulnerabilities are being found everywhere Oh, man. Like, you... The the hardware at the front of your network, I think you would want to be up to date and patched. And so that's why I I put this machine together. And this thing was about $275 bare bones, so I I had to add RAM and a hard drive to it. But the operating system I'm running is called OpenSense.

And this is an open... Well, it's not a book. It's a fork of pfSense. I believe pfSense is also open source, but OpenSense is...

There's some drama around when it forked, but at this point... Oh, classic drama. Yeah. So... But a lot of people use OpenSense. And this is based on FreeBSD, but it basically gives you a web dashboard where you can manage all of your firewall rules. You can set up and and explicitly say for each one of those Ethernet ports, what do they do? Should they be receiving Internet or sending Internet? And then you can also set up VLANs, so you can create guest networks. And all the things you would expect to be able to do on a router, you can do it with OpenSense, and I'm running it on on this hardware.

And one of the reasons also that I set this up is actually load balance my network. So I have Internet, a two gigabit Internet from Xfinity, and then two gigabit Internet from Quantum Fiber, mainly because there's been a couple of times where either one of them dropped, and then I didn't have Internet for days.

And I don't wanna And you gotta... Use that again. Gotta be connected. Yes. You gotta be... That's my job. It's my job to be connected. Yeah. So, essentially, what I do is I load balance the connection. So two of the Ethernet ports are used as incoming connection for both Quantum and Xfinity.

And then within Open Sense, I configure it to be a shared gateway.

So all of the devices on my network will round robin use either of the connections. Gosh. So that way, like, two people could be watching Netflix, and they could be on totally separate two gig connections. You're not interfering with each other. So that's one of the main reasons I did it. And then I actually use the... A third port every now and then. Like, I actually have had a scenario where both of them went down for whatever reason. Like, there was a fire in my alley, so the the cables and the fire... The wires burned, and then all my Internet was down. But I do also have a five g modem, and that's, like, worst case. But if but if I wanna keep all my devices in my house connected, I can just plug that into the third port, and that becomes, like, the the the last piece of Internet I could use if everything else goes down.

Wow.

So, yeah, that that load balances it. And then the other thing that I learned when setting this up is about SFP plus. So these are these little square ports below the Ethernet ports, and these are actual fiber optic connections.

And so, essentially, I have... Let's do the maths. I have two two gigabit connections.

So that's four gigabits of bandwidth total.

Mhmm. And if I were to plug a two gigabit cable from that to the router, that means even though I have four gigabits of connection, all the devices on my network could really only ever saturate about two gigabits.

But with SFP plus, this is a 10 gigabit fiber port. So I have a fiber cable plugged from SFP into my switch, and that means that one fiber can have 10 gigabits of connection across it. So all the devices on my network can use and fully saturate both of those two gigabit Internet connections.

And then I... So I have a switch that has the SFP port, and then it's just like a super cheap 10 port switch that all my other devices are connected into.

Wow.

That's crazy. Again, I think the main thing is I keep this thing updated on a schedule, and OpenSense is very active. Like, they push security updates all the time.

And so I can be sure that the thing guarding the Internet for everything else on my lab is up to date, and I don't have to worry about a manufacturer, like, pushing a firmware update or something like that. Because it also receives all of the updates that FreeBSD get and all of those security updates. Wow. That's wild. Does having a hardware

firewall...

I I get that that is a firewall for your entire network. Does having a hardware firewall that's separate from everything offer, like, any benefits outside of, like, the the ones that you might have? Like, in terms of security, do you know? Like, is it better?

Well, I mean, not... Better in the sense that it's more up to date and I... And more configurable because Okay. I've configured both of the modems for my Internet connections to be a... What's called a bridged connection. So a lot of times, if you're setting something like this this up and your Internet service provider doesn't support it, you basically have... Almost have two firewalls, because the the router and the modem that your ISP ships technically has a firewall on it as well. Right. It's just not as great. And so then traffic would be coming through there and then through yours. But I'm able to set up my modem so that I have a direct connection to the Internet. And then this basically looks at all the traffic coming in and going out of the network. I mean, the other aspect of this is you can set up the firewall as a VPN server. So if you use Tailscale or anything else like that, you're probably running that, like, on one node inside of your network. But with this, you can actually set that machine up to be the firewall... To be the VPN server and then connect directly into it. Yeah. Yeah. Man, that rules. That sounds like a lot of work, but Yeah. I'm very, very interested in this. I mean, the the other thing I'll mention in terms of, like, security is you also have full control of DNS rules. So a lot of people set up, like, a Raspberry Pi with Pyhole, which is like a custom DNS server that that blocks ads.

I'm considering doing this. Yes. Right. And you can do that inside of OpenSint. So there are... You can set up in your DNS block lists, and it uses the exact same format of block lists. And so now you're blocking DNS at the the firewall level instead of, like, routing all of your DNS traffic to a separate device. Wow.

Okay.

Ben, you... You're dialed here. What else are you running? Yeah. I also just mentioned, like, the the Wi Fi portion of this. So, like, that that holds all of my Internet. And then for for Wi Fi, I use an access point. So I'm using a TP Link access point. I mean, I think I got a Wi Fi six one. They recently came out with a Wi Fi seven. It's about $200, but the Wi Fi six one, I can't even... Even with my two two gigabit connections, I can't even saturate it on the access point.

But the other aspect of learning about this network stuff is an access point is kind of just like... It's it's a bit dumb in the sense that it's not a router itself. So Mhmm. It plugs into the network and then broadcasts the network and the DHCP server and everything that that firewall has, but without having any services itself. So it literally just turn... Basically turns a wired switch into a wireless network. And so I have two of these in my house that devices can connect to, and then this also has the ability to set up, like, guest networks.

And so I have a guest network that... That's the Wi Fi password I give to people when they come over, and it's isolated from my home lab. And then I also have a home security network where all of my cameras and IoT devices are plugged into, and that's separate from that network. So basically, I have three separate networks, and that works via VLAN. So in in the config of TP Link, I say this network is on this VLAN, this network's on this VLAN. And then in pfSense, I set up firewall rules that say this VLAN can only access devices within this IP range.

And so that allows me to segment my my network as well. Man, cool. Sick. Yeah. Yeah.

I love that. Can you talk a bit about your your switch that you have? Is it anything crazy, or is it just like a 2.5 gigabit or 10 gigabit switch? Yeah. So I have the 10 gigabit,

for, like, some things, but I don't have any devices currently using 10 gigabit.

It's... A lot of it is is kind of future proof for me Right. Where when I'm buying things, I wanna make sure. But, like, what I will be doing is connecting the the Mac Studio to ten ten gigabit. I will be getting a cal... A better CalDigit or a dock that has 10 gigabit as well.

But one thing that I did upgrade on my NAS was I got a u green Ethernet to give me at least 2.5 on my NAS because the five is is just one gigabit.

So if you do, this u green adapter and then flash a firmware on it, you can get 2.5 on the Synology. So at least get a little bit better speeds there. Do you want me to talk about my my router and stuff in general, but... Or or just, like, my network switch? I mean, if that's something you wanna share, sure. I mean Yeah. So router, I am running a mesh network that's a Wi Fi seven, and it is the Arrow Wi Fi seven Max.

This is a really super good router, although it is, it's Amazon, and there's a subscription service that they have for, like, oh, a VPN and ad blocking and stuff, you know, it's... It it is what it is, but it is Amazon.

And the beef there is that, well, they're upselling you on a lot of stuff because it's Amazon. It's not, like, open.

You know? I I don't like that. I would prefer if it was not that, but this is a really good router, and it has 10 gigabit ports on it and stuff.

And, man, the Wi Fi seven speeds are crazy.

So it... It's it's a really fad... I mean, Wi Fi seven is crazy fast, and I do have a lot of Wi Fi seven devices in my house.

And it... I have three mesh routers, so I have, like, full blanket coverage. It's important because, like, my office is detached from our house. It's, you know, a ways away. I am connected wireless or wired underground, though, so I do have Ethernet run underground in my office. So I do have...

A lot of our network stuff lives in the house, and then some of the the home home lab stuff all lives in my office. So I do have that connected wired.

But, man, yeah, the Amazon router thing rubs me the wrong way in general. But because it's such a good, fast router, I decided, you know what? I'll go to the low management side of thing. And, honestly, the software side of it is very good in terms of, like... I've had other routers in the past that you get into the software side of things, and and you can't manage. I can do anything I would want to do in this app and system, so it feels good to me, you know, as far as, like, creating guest networks or creating, you know, the specific type of network. Maybe I want, like, an IoT network or something like that. I can do all of that inside of here. No problem. And it auto updates itself overnight and everything like that. So it is very nice. It's a nice system. Yeah. It makes total sense. I think if you're con... Comparing and contrasting our two approaches, like, my approach took me months to figure out

and decide and configure and plug all together.

And so I... If you're at home and wondering what you should do, it really comes down to, like, being a home network admin is a part time job, basically. Like Yes. I need to I need to make sure that, like, my my... I mean, my wife depends on the network as well. So, like, I gotta make sure the network's up and things are working and things are fast.

And if you're using off the shelf stuff, most of the time, you don't have to do too much to make sure that it just it just works.

Yeah. Ideally, I would like to to just throw a pie hole in here as well, but I haven't done that yet. So I will say, at this point, I think I have

six months of uptime. So, like, no downtime. Internet hasn't gone down. Better than railway. Yeah. Exactly.

So at this point, I've got it dialed, but it it was a process to get there. There were a couple of weeks where things were up and down, and my wife was pretty mad at me. But... Yeah.

Yeah. I would I would personally... I would not use the ISP's router, man. The CenturyLink with fiber, they were, like, really trying to make you use their router. And... But you can just call... What what what key is that? Do you know what it's called when you get the... You get a key from them?

Well, the... I... As I remember it, it was... It's the PPOE username and password.

Yes. That's what it is. PPOE username and password. Like, so I was on CenturyLink as well. They they got bought by Quantum.

So that's what I'm using now. And then the the Quantum modem, like, supports it out of the box. You don't need the PPOE username password anymore. Yeah. You basically can just plug right in, and it'll work. But you... Like I mentioned earlier, you can also go into the settings and set it up as bridge mode, and that will give you basically direct direct access. Yeah. So so Quantum...

I I looked into Quantum because I only have two gigabit or one gigabit from from CenturyLink, and and Quantum is the same price for two. Like... Right? But when I talked to them, they wanted to install, permanently install, a box onto my wall. And my Yeah. My entry point is in my living room. Like like TV and that... Like, you're you're gonna install something right there sitting on the side of my TV, totally ruining the aesthetics of my living room? I'm not I'm not gonna do that. I will say it probably depends on the tech who's installing, but the guy I got was super cool.

Really? Because I was like I was like, here's my whole set... You can see my server rack. I have my whole setup.

Where do we put this thing? And he was... And and my server rack has holes on the side. So I was like, can you just zip tie it to that? And he was like, sure. And then when he was on the way out, he was like, yeah. At this point, you can actually do whatever you want with it. Technically, you're supposed to leave it, but he was like, we don't care as long as it's plugged in. So I guess,

it might depend on the tech. I don't know. I know. I called them. I even had somebody scheduled to come over, and I was like, so you really gotta install this thing on my wall? They're like, yep. I'm like, there's no way around that. Nope. I'm like, oh, okay. I'll pull the plug then and say no. Yeah. Yeah. So we talked about hardware

and network. So, like, how does the Internet get into our house? Where's everything running? Let's talk about how we get access to all of our services. So Yes. Things like domain names, Tailscale,

that that different kind of stuff. Do you wanna wanna kick it off? Oh, yeah. So I've been using Tailscale for a while. What tail... People will be like, oh, just use WireGuard, which is like the protocol for devices like a VPN protocol. I'm not an expert. But Tailscale just allows you to set it up easily.

You can have multiple users. You can have all kinds of access rules. Like, if I wanna add something to my tail scale, it it... I have to go through several approval processes and give it exact access to which machines it has access to, and it gives me that control over it. So I put everything on Tailscale.

I even put my, steam machine and steam deck on Tailscale.

I literally put everything on there so that way I can connect to anything outside of my my normal network when I'm away. It makes it really easily if I'm away from my own personal network, I still have tail skill to connect anything to anything to anything at least in which I have set up and configured.

So I I love... A huge fan of that that project, huge fan of that product. And I do pay for the... I think it's, like, even, like, $5 a month, MolVad, VPN exit for Tailscale, which means that if I'm connected to Tailscale and the VPN... Or the MolVad is turned on, then I just get a Movad VPN sitting in front of all my network traffic on any device, and that's nice. It's cheap. Works easily.

And then for accessing things on my own local network, I use KADI for domains and SSL.

So all of my home services, regardless of what device they're running on, they have a domain that I have specifically set. And, because I have Cloudflare pointing the DNS to my tail scale network, I don't have to mess with host files on anything. Right? Like, especially, like, my wife is on Tailscale, my kids are on Tailscale, I want them to be able to visit my Jellyfin server at a domain instead of typing in an IP address with a port. I want them to be able to do that easily enough or share services like our agent, which we'll we'll talk about. But, like, I just want them to be able to access all of that. But then, obviously, if anyone else were to try to visit those, it would not allow them to visit.

Exactly. On my Tailscale network.

Yes. Yeah.

And so I I have a similar setup, but I think the...

This is the key piece of figuring out the Home Lab here is because, like, let's... You're hosting everything in your house, but sometimes you're on vacation and you wanna access some of your services. And Yes. Before something like Tailscale, is it pretty tricky? Like, you would have to set up, like, a VPN on your home network and Or I was tunneling everything. I was using Cloudflare tunnels for everything. Yes. And and then when you're doing that, you're potentially exposing it to the Internet. So, like, anybody that knows the tunnel address could get to it. Then you put you put axe... Whatever the Cloudflare access control is, and then you gotta do, like, three logins to get into any of your services. Yes. Yeah. So this is this is the way for sure. And so I have a similar setup where where basically every service in my house... So we'll talk about all the apps that we're running, but every single one has a subdomain for a domain that that I bought.

But those domains point to local IP addresses. I I do this with KADI and Cloudflare because with a cloud flip... With Cloudflare, if your domain is hosted there, they actually let you create SSL certificates for domains that are pointed to local IP addresses. So normally, when you're getting an SSL certificate or TLS certificate with something like let's encrypt, they need to ping that IP to make sure that this is the same server and the server that you're allocating this TLS certificate for is the same server.

But if you try to point it at a local IP address, like ten dot zero dot zero dot whatever or one nine two dot one six eight dot one dot whatever, Let's Encrypt's not gonna let you do that out of the box. So you can use the Cloudflare plugin for Let's Encrypt, put your domain on Cloudflare, and now you actually can create TLS certificates for local addresses, like 10 dot or one nine two dot.

And and so, like, so I have my SSL stuff being done through Caddy. Is is is

that approach different? You're you're No. It's it's it's the same. Yes. But KADI is using Let's Encrypt. Like, that's their default, frankly. Right. But why do it in Cloudflare instead of in in KADI? Just The Cloudflare allows me to use local IP addresses. Gotcha. Yeah. So so, yeah, to to clarify, in Cloudflare, I have one setting that says star.mydomain.com Yes. Points to my network. That's that's the only thing that I have set up inside of Cloudflare.

Then for each service, when a certificate needs to be provisioned, it actually has to ping Cloudflare to say, yes, you own this domain, and, yes, I'll point it at a local IP address. That's the only connection there.

Okay. So maybe I have that set up, and I don't even know it because an agent did it for me. I think you might also be pointing yours at Tailscale IP addresses, not I am. Okay. So that's... Yes. Correct. Okay. That is why. Yeah. Like, technically, I I mean, I don't know the the intricate details of Tailscale, but I do believe that those IP addresses, they're not exactly private. Like, they're... You still... You can only access them when you're on the Telescale network, but it doesn't fall into the same private IP address range, like ten dot whatever or one nine two dot whatever. Gotcha. And I'm guessing there's some kind of Tel scale plug in for caddy so that it can know that you have access to that specific tail net, that specific IP address range, I'm guessing.

Yeah.

Okay. Sick. People who don't know this, the the local domain thing is just so clutch. Even for my... All my dev services, every every single dev service, every dev server that I have running when I'm working on projects, everything has a domain and an SSL. So that way you can get a secure context in dev on Safari, which you need for auth and all kinds of stuff. So Yeah. Yes. It's nice.

And then you don't have to worry about weird IPs and stuff. I can just load it up on my phone, and it works like a normal website.

So Exactly.

Yeah. And the the other piece here is, like, having KADI as kind of, like, the the load balancer or the entry point. Like, I have one KADI server with, like, 20 different entries that all point to different things that are on my home lab, but that one server is in charge of provisioning the SSL certificates and then routing traffic to all of the various services. Mhmm. Yep. Cool. Alright. Let's get into

network area storage, NAS, and storage I in I mentioned that I have a Synology.

It is like the kind of classic DS one nine eighteen plus. My god.

Nine eighteen plus. This is like kind of like the classic starter NAS in terms of it's expensive, but it it is, like, four drives.

It it... When it came out, it was powerful enough to do video encoding on, although they've since, like, changed that in the OS, I believe.

And I threw over time. I've had this for a long time now. I... I've just kind of upgraded drives here and there, and I'm now at 40 terabytes.

And I...

It's it's pretty sick. I have offline backups with Backblaze, using the Glacier storage, and I I really like my Synology. I used to run a lot of software on it, CJ. Like, I used to run, like, Plex or or MB. I used to run a ton of stuff on it, but I've since moved most of that software to the Mac Mini and then just letting the Synology handle storage and then a a couple of software pieces that I don't feel like moving.

Yeah. I I I think for anybody getting into this, that's actually one of the one stop solutions. Or there's similar products out there like that where, yes, it's your NAS, but it also runs Docker containers and can run all of those services directly. So, like, I think if you're just getting started in the home lab space, a device like that is really good to get up and going because there's not a lot of configuring that needs to be done. You just plug in some drives, You've got network storage, and then you can host services.

But Yeah. Similar to you, I separate my stuff out. Yeah. And and I I have mine pretty locked down in terms of... There... There's all kinds of, like, access, software built into the Synology, like QuickConnect or any of that stuff. And I I really went through the process of, like, making sure I, one, don't have any of that stuff turned on.

You can only access this thing through keys or via my my home network in the in the UI. But, again, like, I I don't want my my NAS exposed to the Internet in any regard. So... Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And and that's one of the things you... Like, if you turn that service on, it basically allows you to access your NAS from anywhere in the world, which can be convenient. But in... If you're anywhere in the world, anybody else in the world could try to hack into your your NAS from anywhere else. Yeah. So, like, really... And and also, like, having individual users per

file store, whether that's my syntax folder or level up folder or whatever, like, really scoping access to what

individual services cannot, you know, access what, turning off admin, those types of things. And I guess how do you access that storage on your various devices? Do you mount, like, a drive on your Mac that has direct access to it, or how are you connecting Yeah. Them

I I I do that, and I I have each each... I have I have several drives broken out, whether that's the media and anything like that, each with it Mhmm. With its own access. And, yes, I do mount those. I have them set up to auto mount on my MacBook Pro, and then so...

Which was all... Well, that was a pain, man. I I was running into so many situations where, like, the auto mounting wouldn't work and then stuff wouldn't be available or my my Mac mini restarts, and now suddenly I gotta go log in there and manually reconnect all my drives. So... Yeah. Nice. So

my setup is, again, pieced together.

I mean, the... I think the theme of my setup is, like, I spend way too much time and then, like, ultimately, I'm paying... I'm not I'm not using any hosted services or paying anything, but I... All my time got sunk into actually setting it all Yeah. But... Yeah. Yeah. It is funny because, like, yeah, I I went with a lot of off the shelf products,

but a lot of it is because I I just didn't wanna manage it at the time. Like I said, I've had this I've had this analogy for a long time. So, like, when I made that decision... I might make that decision differently today with Right.

Better controls and tools and AI to help me, like, understand what connects to what or whatever, because I'm not a networking expert, and I never have been. But at the time, this just seemed like the best option. Definitely.

And so my NAS, my net... My storage setup is two different devices.

So I talked about it at the beginning, but I have this RAID array, and this is not network attached. So it literally is just a box that you put up to four hard drives inside of, and then it's called... What's it's what's called hardware hardware RAID. So there's actually, like, a switch on the back where you say what RAID should be. It configures all of that. And then when you plug it in, it just shows up as a single device. I guess we we haven't really talked about, like, what RAID is. Basically, RAID is a redundant array of independent disks, and it allows you to take multiple disks and turn them into, like, a single disk with various forms of redundancy or mirroring.

Yeah. And we won't get into it here. But, basically, you you you decide how do you wanna mirror, how do you want to be redundant, or how do you wanna have parity data. So, like, if one drive fails, you don't lose all of your data. That's the kind of thing that that RAID gives you. So I have four ten terabyte drives in here, and I'm using RAID one zero, which means I only have 20 terabytes of actual storage.

But that means I can lose a... Like, a drive can fail and I don't lose any of my data. I can swap the drive in, it'll rebuild, and I'm and I'm good to go. But this is just a USB So any device that I wanna do what I call cold storage on, I'll plug this in, drop all the, like, media files or whatever else I'm trying to back up, unplug it, and then it just sits on my rack unplugged.

That, to me, is gonna make the hard drives last a whole lot longer, and it's not just, like, spinning all all the time. So that's my cold storage. And then my hot storage, where all of my media is, is this little Beelink device. It's pretty slick. It has six m dot two ports inside of it. Yes. Basically, it's like a a vertical machine.

And then on both sides, there are three spots for m dot two drives to plug into, and then the center stack is the cooling stack. So that's where it has, like, a fan. But I have three four terabyte drives on one side and then three two terabyte drives on the other side. And those are set up as two different storages that I can connect you and save stuff onto. I will say I got in right before the increase in price on every... Like, if were to try to build this thing, I would like too on my on my m two caching layer, which maybe I should talk about.

Yeah. The... But the the four terabyte drives now are, like, almost 1,000 in some places or more.

I think I paid about $3,400 for each of the four terabyte drives.

That machine, this little b link that has all six of those SSDs in it, is running Proxmox.

So even though I'm I don't have... I'm not actually running any virtual machines on this or anything like that, Proxmox has one of the best ways of setting up a ZFS pool, which is a software way of taking multiple disks and turning turning them into a single drive. And so I have Proxmox running on here, ZFS pools, and then those are available on my network via Samba. So Samba is like a old older Windows technology, but basically, every machine speaks it. And so any machine on my network that wants to store stuff on this driver or read data from it mounts it as a a Samba drive.

The other piece of this is I'm also running a piece of software called Cockpit, which is from the Fedora team, but you can run it on pretty much any Linux operating system.

And it essentially is like a web dashboard for managing that Linux system.

But one of the main reasons I use it is they have a really nice way of configuring your ZFS pools, like deciding which disks go into a specific pool, and then also deciding which SMB stores you want to make available. And you can also manage all of your users from there. So it's a bit of a a wonky setup because, like, technically, I probably

could just be using something like Fedora with Cockpit instead of, like, Proxmox with Cockpit. But, you know, I I I Yeah. Tried all these various things. And when you build this stuff, it's like you're getting one thing at a time, and then, you know, if you were building out the system from scratch at the very start or whatever, choices that you make might be different along the way. Right? Like Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But it gives you pages to

manage your your firewall. You can see... You can actually access your terminal directly.

You can manage your ZFS pools, that kind of stuff. That one device holds all of my movies, music, books, all all of the media that I consume from the apps that we'll we'll talk about in a second.

All of that lives on that drive, and then any machine on my network can mount it and read and write from it. Sick. I'll I'll show my RAID setup real quick, if you don't mind. Yeah. Because I didn't describe this very well, folks. Sorry. So I'm running four drives, two fourteen point six terabyte drives, two twelve point seven terabyte drives. It's just the order in which I acquired them is is when it is. So I I have via the... Synology has, like, their proprietary RAID, which is the Synology hybrid RAID.

Because of that, that's how I have the 40 terabytes available. So I I obviously have more storage in my drives than than that. But the way that the Synology hybrid one works is so that you can pull one drive out, put another one in, and it just automatically repairs itself.

But, again, I have fault tolerance for one drive. So if one drive fails... If two drives fail, I might be in trouble. Two... But I... If I get a message... Because I get alerts for all that. If I get a message that one of my drives is having problems, I'm on it. So Yeah. You know, obviously, catastrophe, but I do have off-site backup as well. And then I have this SSD cache storage as well for two terabytes, well, two terabytes rated to one terabyte.

And so, yeah, same thing, just m two plugged into the bottom of the Synology or whatever cache drives in there, just for a fast caching because, man, these, NAS drives are slow.

Right. And we're used to SSDs, so I I I couldn't have that. But, yeah, that's what I'm running. So, like, the the nature of spinning disks, they're gonna be slower. And so this cache layer makes it so that, like, when you access a file, puts it onto the cache, keeps it hot.

Then if you're not accessing it anymore, like, it removes it from the the SSD. So Yep. Cool. Alright. Let's talk about container management. We got a little bit into CJ's Proxmock. I'm I'm running a couple of things for containers that...

The Synology itself has software for... It's called the container manager, and it just allows you to manage your containers. That's how I manage all the containers on my Synology.

And then I also have on my Mac mini, run OrbStack to manage my containers, which is basically just, like, easy modern kind of container management, just replacing Docker desktop for me. But I don't have an advanced system. I just put everything into OrbStack,

and, yeah, that's what I... I've been doing for a little bit here. Yeah. Makes sense. I wouldn't call mine advanced. It's just I wanna be able to access and manage my stuff from the web browser. So that's what both Proxmox and another tool I use, Portainer Yeah. Give me access to. So with Proxmox, like I mentioned earlier, you can create virtual machines from the web browser. You create machines, configure them, decide how much hardware they get or whatever else. But Proxmox also supports containers.

So in the same way that you would create a new virtual machine, you can create a new container, choose what image it should be, and then that thing will will boot up. I actually don't use the containerization part of Proxmox.

I just use it for virtual machines. Okay. And then on each of those virtual machines, they each have, like, eight CPUs between sixteen and twenty four gigs of RAM. And so each of those virtual machines is a very beefy machine itself. And then I actually run Docker on each one of those. And so then I have containers running on each one of those virtual machines. Wow. When you have lots of containers Yeah. You wanna manage it in some way. Right? Docker PS will only get you so far. And so one of the tools I use is called Portainer, And you install this on any machine that has Docker running. You could even install it on your desktop if you want to. But this gives you a web dashboard where you can see all of your running containers, and it just gives you a web GUI of being able to launch new containers. You can add what's called a registry where people post, like, all of their Docker Compose examples of various types of setups. So, like, later on, we're about to talk about all of our various services. So things like Jellyfin or Audio Bookshelf, like these types of services that you would wanna set up. People have created Docker Compose files that are kinda just ready to go, and then you drop them onto Portainer. It spins up those containers, and then they're they're starting and running. And so Portainer is really nice to have that web way of of managing everything. And then very similar to Proxmox, Portainer allows you to have multiple instances on multiple servers, and then you can have a single dashboard to to manage all of them.

Yeah. And then the last piece is I use a tool called Termix for SSH ing into all of my my servers. Cool. And I've heard I've heard you talk about a similar thing before, Scott, but this this kind of gives you that. But basically, I have Termix running in one of those containers on one of those virtual machines. But this is also a central management point for any server that I very often SSH into.

And so basically, again, this gives you a web dashboard, but you can run any sort of command from the web dashboard and directly access any of those servers that you wanna directly manage. And they also have a mobile app. So if you wanna SSH into your servers from there as well, that's another another way to do it. Yeah.

Sick. Man, that rips. Very... It is so funny. I I love... This is why I'm so excited to do this episode. I'm learning so much from you right now. Stuff I didn't even know... Like, I know existed and stuff, but a lot of this is... Like I said, I'm not, like, a network pro. So for me, it's like, what does this fit into? How does this fit in? You know? Yeah.

Let's talk about home automation. I... We did a whole episode, Wes and I did, on this stuff before, so we can go through pretty quickly on this. I do run Home Assistant. It runs on a Raspberry Pi via Home Assistant OS.

It's just kind of always there, and I connect everything to it in my my my house. I have personally replaced just about all of my switches with Lutron Caseta switches, both dimmers and otherwise.

They're awesome. They work great. Everything is is very automatable and home assistant, and because of that, it... It's really nice. And my wife hates it when the lights in the kitchen turn off at 07:00 when she has friends over or whatever.

But what I need to get is a millimeter wave present sensor in there and stuff like that. But I do run quite a bit of that, and I do love my home assistant setup. I'm tweaking it all the time. I do have a number of different temperature sensors. I have an Ecobee thermostat, those types of things.

But the one thing I've really been liking is getting these devices that are made, like, out of ESP devices and stuff. A company that does this is Apollo Automation.

They make these three d printed little, like, little shell devices that are... I I don't know. I think they're maybe hand built, but either way, things are great because they don't come with any software. They don't make you install some Nice. Shitty app from China, and you... They're pretty much made to just connect automatically to Home Assistant. Then they have things like, oh, they have an audio casting unit now. That's interesting. I haven't seen that. But I have their air quality sensor, and it's so good because what I really wanted out of an air quality sensor wasn't just like wasn't just c o two and stuff like that, of which is important to have. This thing does, like, particulate.

It can, you know, look for mold in the air, and it's really, really super good for the price. And because they are not coming with software, not coming with subscriptions or, you know, all of that, you can get much better prices on the devices. So I really like this little, Apollo automation.

And that's pretty much what I run there. I recently, as of, like, this week, got my Wyze Cams flashing, and this is even the Wyze Cam v four, which they just added support to.

I've been flashing the thing...

Thingo? Thing? Thingno. Thingno. I've been flashing the Thingno firmware to them all. So that way, I can use them outside of the Wyze stuff.

And then I did set up my Frigate software which allows you to connect these cameras and then have recording going to my own stuff rather than somebody else's servers or even the SD card. So it is running kind of twenty four seven on my system and then saving it to my NAS of which I have a ton of space on. So now I can run automations to that through Home Assistant, presence sensing, and that type of stuff directly from the Wyze Camera. So that's something that's in progress right now. So far, the the process has been really smooth, especially with having Claude Coe to walk me through some of it in terms of, like, flashing, which is is really pretty minimal. You just, you know, flashing the firmware to the micro SD, popping it in there, turning the camera on, and then it handles the rest. So really pretty nice. Nice. Yeah. I I wanna look into that as well. Because I've been looking at forget for the longest time and then just have never set it up. Cause I had several Wyze Cams as well, but I think that's gonna be my next project. Yeah. I just did it. Now I'm I'm... I've only done two cameras, so I'm I'm ready to do the rest of them. Nice.

I would say... So my...

For my home automation, I have Home Assistant running as a virtual machine on that Proxmox server that we talked about earlier. So Home Assistant gives you various ways to install it. Like, one way is like a Raspberry Pi direct image. They also have a ready to go virtual machine image that you can run on on Proxmox. So that's what I have running there. And everything's connected in. And just like Scott, I try my best to find things that are not tied to the cloud. And so every room has a smart switch in it, like, installed directly into the wall. And those...

I actually don't remember the exact brand that I got. But essentially, when I'm searching for this stuff, I look for things that have a firmware called Tasmada or or ESP home.

They're both very similar projects where essentially, there's like an ESP 32 inside, and it has firmware that's ready to go and and will automatically be able to connect it to your home assistant. And so these Matter Smart Switches I'm showing on Amazon right now are like $20, and this would work. Like, this is not tied to the cloud in any way. You can install these in the rooms, and then they'll connect up to your home assistant, and it's all local to your house.

Another brand that I like to use is called Kauf. So anywhere I have, like, a bulb, not necessarily a switch, but a bulb that I wanna control.

These Kauf Kauf bulbs, k a u f, are...

I... When I bought them, I think they were maybe $10 apiece.

But, again, you don't have to do anything crazy because they ship with ESP home, and you can put Tasmada on them, and and they're ready to just plug right in.

One other thing I do is I have these Govee temperature sensors.

These are interesting because they tell you you should install an app, and then the app is, like, some Chinese app, and it's like you're sending the temperature data to China. There... There's so many that app that is, like, the same app cloned a billion... Like, smart home or all this stuff. And every time... If it tells you install, I'm like, first, I'm like, no, bro. No. Yeah. But the cool thing about... So this this one is this... This three pack is the one I got. So it's $35, and it comes with three sensors. They each have humidity and temperature on them, and they keep track of, like, min and max temperature.

But they are just Bluetooth devices. So they are constantly just sending over Bluetooth. What is my current temperature? What is my current humidity? And so you don't need to use that China app.

You can use an ESP 32 or a small Raspberry Pi running a a... What's called a Bluetooth proxy on it. And all of that comes from, like, Home Assistant.

And so Home Assistant has an integration for the Bluetooth proxy. That Bluetooth proxy just sits in my living room and slurps up the Bluetooth of all of these devices. And so I turn them on, link them in the Home Assistant dashboard, and now I have temperature sensors, like, in every room and, like, on my porch, but they're they're just Bluetooth. It's not like Z Wave or or any of those other things. Yeah. And then the Which I'm running, like, everything. I'm running Z Wave. I'm running Matter. I'm running all that stuff. Yeah. Just to support everything.

Right. And I think if if I could find cheap... Like, these devices are, like, less than $10 apiece. It's very hard to find cheap, like, cheaper Z Wave or b... I get... What was the other one? B... Is it Bee Link or b? Bee Link. Bee Link is the

is Beelink the company?

What is the protocol? It is. Yes. I forget the...

Yes.

But these various, like, wireless protocols that you can get on on devices. But, yeah, this this was a fun one, the the temperature. And then my lock that... When I bought the house that actually have it was a Z Wave device, so you can unlock it and lock it. And there is an integration for Home Assistant, and all I had to do was get, like, a little Z Wave USB that plugs into my server.

I then map that USB into the VM, and now my home assistant is able to connect to Z Wave devices and and and everything else. So... Zigbee. You're thinking of Zigbee? Zigbee. Yeah. That's what it Zigbee, Z Wave matter. And I do have a... Some... Another thing I have in my house is... Oh, my thermostat is actually Zigbee.

And, again, that... My house came with it, so

I'm just using that one. Your house came with it. That's cool. Yeah. Sick. Oh, man. Yeah. I I love all... I could geek out on the home assistant stuff forever because I I got so much running on mine. I have, like, an automation that plays our family music playlist, like our dinner music playlist, which is a highly curated 600 song playlist of all kinds of stuff for dinner every single night. So when we're gonna eat dinner, we get a nice little... All of the speakers around our house start playing at the perfect volume of random songs from this playlist and stuff. It's the best. I I love all modination stuff. Let's talk about, like, apps and and and stuff that we're running... Services that we're running, because I know CJ are running a whole lot of stuff. Some of the stuff, we're running the same stuff. But for media, I I have been running Jellyfin and Plex side by side. Reason being is that I was running to some issues with the Plex offline downloading, and I've just been... I was so wrapped up into Plex. I was like, you know what? I got Plex on my TV.

I I didn't wanna flash all this stuff to my my Tizen TV for Jellyfin, but I've I've since been working with Jellyfin pretty much primarily lately, and I do really like, Jellyfin in in those regards and, being able to customize it and that type of stuff. There are some things I don't like about both systems, like how collections work and how media and movies or whatever, all that stuff works. Like, none of these media services really are the way that I want them to just just work. Like, point it at my thing and have it work like Netflix type of Like, there's so much management set up in in in all of this stuff, but I I do really have my my JellyFin and honestly, my Plex pretty dialed.

And, yeah, I I really like it. I did install... End up installing a custom app on my on my TV for jellyfish, so that's how we manage... Watched that, which was a whole process in itself.

I run Audiobookshelf, which is a great app for audiobooks.

It is kind of like the plex for audiobooks. It's very wonderful. The mobile apps for it aren't great, but there's a ton of third party ones. And since vibe coding has been a thing, people are vibe coding audio bookshelf requests a whole ton. And then I run Image for my media, for my photos as a Mhmm. Google Photos replacement, even though I do still run Google Photos because my family's sharing Google Photos, so I got all my stuff in two places, which I don't love, but I do like having Image to do the backups automatically and everything instead of, you know, like, having it back up locally, knowing that I could delete my entire Google Photos at any point and have it just work still.

And then I am running a Minecraft server for a bunch of kids, of which we've just gotten into modding.

So we're we're modding our server. We're doing all kinds of fun stuff to it, and...

Yes. My... Whenever I I ping my agent about my Mac Mini struggling, it's always like, well, you have this Minecraft server you should stop. And I was like, well, I can't stop it. I got a bunch of kids gonna be texting me if I, you know, they're gonna be... They... My my son has the tin can, which is like a like a landline phone for kids. And, like, the moment the server goes down, that thing starts ringing off the hook. Man, I've got the server down.

Yeah. That's great.

Sweet. So I I have a very similar setup for media. So, yeah, Jellyfin for all of my movies, TV, but also music. Recently, I didn't even realize that Jellyfin supported it. But if you you throw your music in there, it pulls in album art cover, and it has like a a view for showing your the track track lists and everything.

And on Android... Yeah. And on Android, I use an app called Finamp, integrates perfectly, and allows me to sync music. And so I actually don't access my Jellyfin server outside of my house. Yes. But with something like Finamp, I can choose the albums I want, download, and then it works offline. And they also have, like, a car...

Not CarPlay, but Android Auto. Oh, okay. Yeah. So Yeah. Yeah. I I I sync all my albums. So my albums live on that media server, the NAS server I showed earlier. Jellyfin reads it from there, and then the Android app allows me to sync them locally. And so I can choose the albums I wanna listen to this week and then not have to stream it from a server. Yeah. All my movies, TV are there as well. And Audiobookshelf

does podcasts, like, offline, local and offline podcast saving to save it to your your your home network instead of downloading it and syncing it to your device or whatever.

I don't use that very much. I do access my jellyfin, though, off network, but only on tail scale network. So I guess it's not off network. Yeah.

Yeah. I didn't know Audiobookshelf did podcasts too. But, yeah, Audiobookshelf has been a huge unlock. I've... I'm listening to so many audiobooks now. Yeah. I love it. Have you heard of the the Dungeon Crawler Carl series?

I've heard of it, and it's it's one of those things that I would listen to or or be into, but I just haven't... I don't know. I haven't had the the time for it, even though it's it's on my radar for sure. You liking it? But, yeah, it's it's... So the the narrator, Jeff Hayes, is so good. He does different voices,

and then the studio that they're in also adds, like, sound effects. So, like, it's a really immersive audiobook experience. But I'm on book six of Dungeon Crawler Carl, listening through Audiobookshelf.

So Yes. Again, there's also an Audiobookshelf app where you can download any audiobooks. Those stay on your phone. You don't have to stream them, and then you can listen to them just like you would with audio... Audible or whatever else. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Big unlock. We haven't gotten too much into, like, how do you get media, and I don't think we're gonna talk too much about it. But I will say check into rip all my... I buy a DVD from amazon.com,

and then I rip it, and then I use MakeMKV or whatever to turn it into media files. That's how I do it, folks. Definitely.

And I do the same for CDs. But one thing to look into is an app called Seer, seerr.dev.

It's a media request management app. That's all I'll say. Look into it. But basically, it makes it much more seamless to get media if if you're...

Have multiple people in your house that want things on your on your media server. I'm gonna do a whirlwind tour of all the other media apps I have. So I'm I have my my own RSS feed reader. I use mini flux for that. I've talked about that in the past. I think we did a dedicated episode on RSS feeds, but, yeah, I use mini flux for that. And then I use an app called Wallabag for read later. So any article I find in my feed reader that I wanna save, I save it. That syncs with Wallabag.

And then, again, I have a Wallabag app that can download articles so I can read them offline. Both of those apps are running in a container on my machine that I talked about earlier.

One app that I use running in a container is called Tube Archivist.

So one thing that I've been wanting to do is, like, just have as much media as possible offline and not need the Internet.

Yes. And so Tube Archivist lets you point it at various YouTube channels, and you can pick and choose which YouTube videos you wanna save onto your media server. Man, that rolls. That's cool. Yeah. I mean, we think about, like, other types of media, but we kind of just assume YouTube's always gonna be available.

But I've gone through and, like, all my favorite YouTube videos throughout the years, those are on my my media server as well. Yeah. That's cool. I've never seen that. Yeah. I I use YouTube DL whenever I want something, but then, like, in the same regard. That's... It it breaks all the time. I'm annoyed with it, or then I gotta click and drag, and it's not automatic and all that stuff. Yeah. And as far as I know, I think it uses that behind the scenes, but it basically gives you a web dashboard where you can Yeah. Pick which channels you wanna back up. You can set automatic backup schedules, that that kind of thing. Yeah. That rules. Yeah. And then the other thing is just, like, off line Internet. So I have offline copies of Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and then a ton of different Stack Exchange websites.

So like Ask Ubuntu, Ask Computer Science.

I forget what it's called, but it's like Ask a Veterinarian. There's an entire forum where people ask questions about pet pets and stuff like that. But I have backups of all of those, and those actually come from a service called Kiwiks, k I w I x. So if you go to kiwiks.org, you can learn about all the stuff that they do. But they run regular backups of Wikipedia and various other websites, and then you can download those as individual XIM files.

And so those XIM files, again, are stored on my same media server, but that means I can access Wikipedia offline. I can access all these other things offline as well. And then I built a couple of internal services. So I have what's called a a XIM library manager where I can check to see, is there an update to this XIM file? It's a much more streamlined browsing experience than what they give you on the Kuebix website. So I just have that running on my home lab where I can basically say, like, I always wanna have the latest Wikipedia, download it when it becomes available, and it allows me to kind of search through all of the the backups that they have to pick and choose the ones that I want as well. Because one of the other things that they offer are DevDocs backups. So fully self contained offline backups of Node. Js documentation and MDN documentation and and and all of those other services. So I've got a giant folder with hundreds of backed up websites that I can I can I can I can access?

Wow. That's crazy. I bet you're gonna... It's gonna come in handy for you when the entire Internet goes down with all these hacks that are happening. Exactly. I'm preparing. This is my Yeah. My my doomsday...

Like, the Internet will go down, but I also have Internet in my house.

One last piece, which is just good for managing a household, is an app called Paperless NGX.

And this is just document storage. So you can upload PDFs, text files, Word docs, and then categorize them, and it just gives you a nice dashboard to manage all of them. But one of the main things I use this for is for all of my manuals for every device that I buy. So, like, my washer, my dryer, my my TV, or any other, like, one off device, my headphones. Like, the number of times I forget how to turn on... Like, do Bluetooth pairing for these, like, random headphones, and then I have to, like, search the web to find the the manual.

I download the manual once, upload it to the server, and now I can instantly instantly search for it. So

I have so many thoughts about that. I've been wanting to get a complete catalog of every single device model software version of everything in my house, which, like, to be able to

work with any of them or have all that information at a glance or be able to to use AI to to to modify them or, you know, hack them myself or whatever. So Yeah. Man. That... That's the way as well. Like, it's because a a lot of the sites where you download manuals these days are just very scammy too. Like, there's just, like, ads everywhere, and, like, they don't let you... Like, you have to use their site to download the manual. So Yeah. Paperless n g... NGX has been a huge unlock there because I don't have to go searching once I've...

Once I know that I have the manual locally. Yeah.

I think a lot of people use it for, like... I don't do this, but you could use it for personal documents too, like tax documents or basic... It's basically like a virtual filing cabinet. But it has, like, built in indexing and search and things you would expect if you're you're storing all your all your documents on your home lab.

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I... I've been doing it all via my own kind of, like, custom markdown thing that I've been building, but this seems pretty cool.

Man, I'm getting so interested in everything you're doing here. Alright. Let's talk about AI coding agents. I have an agent that is running kind of all the time that was initially based off of that personal device that I I had. It's like that personal prompt device that I had. This is an agent that is running via PyDurable.

And I I set up a stream mode version where it, like, changes all of my to do names here, so none of these are none of these are real. But either way, I I... It's like a to... It's the to do app of my dreams. I can put personal to dos in here. I can set their priorities. And at any given point, if I want to have things blocked, they can block, or I can send it to an agent to start work on, and it just starts work on it instantly. And then as part of that, I also have this document editor, which is really great. I... I'm... By the way, I'm trying to sell this Sure k... KSM 32 if anybody wants it. They're expensive. Trying to find out what what I can sell it for. Either way, it's a full on document editor that saves everything to markdown that has multiplayer, so my wife can use it, and then it also has, like, agent integration directly in here, and every single tool I have in this has its own agent panel that I can chat with, and when I chat in this agent panel, it automatically references this document. So if I'm chatting with this agent and it's not a generalized chat, it's gonna reference this document specifically.

Or I also do have a general chat again, and this is all running through PyDurable.

I have my calendar set up in here. I have auto fixing bugs and errors in here, and there's a lot of stuff going on in this app. But, again, it has it has a chat that can work with any document, any to do, or ideas. Let's say I have an idea. I can jot it down randomly. I can reference it, and this whole thing has WebMCP, so my other agents can work with it, or the agent inside of this can modify. It has tools to modify or update any docs, to dos, or whatever.

Man, I've been loving this tool. So this is all built on PyDurable, and this is my own personal agent.

I also have been lately coding with t three code over my network, which is really nice because it it... It's just like I I have everything running on my Mac Mini and my MacBook, and I have found that I do really like the GUI side of things. I just do. I like the GUI side of things. I I... I've tried it a whole bunch, and in general, I've moved back and forth on things.

And in fact, I am using something that I can't show you here too that is a two way based thing that's kind of like a herder like, but also very, very good.

We'll talk about it. I'll talk about it more later, but I'm not at liberty to show right now. But I do really love some aspects of T3 code here, and I wanna see if I can

show you what I'm talking about here. So is T3 code, like, open source in the sense that you can

serve it from your own server? You can serve it from your own server, and in fact, I'm not paying or connecting to anything. It uses any of the harnesses that I want, so I have I can change from antigravity to Copilot to PIE to Codex.

Any of the stuff I wanna change harnesses is just in here, and it it just works super well. One thing I really love about t three code specifically is that it can render HTML in the output easily.

So I have a...

An AI...

It's a script actually that's that's loaded in via skill that when an AI is responding to me and it needs my opinion, it styles it in HTML in this nice interface to show me, like, okay. What is the actual question you're asking me? What do you need from me? And then it also does this nice UI for my decks, which is my task management for AI. So it can show me, like, where it's at in the tasks. And then I also have it kind of... This is just a demo. The... I'm, like, working on some new interfaces for it. But it also hides things behind, like, an accordion in here. So, like, sometimes, you know, like, AI can give you this big old paragraph, and you're just like, oh, bro, come on. I can hide things in a details and summary paragraph, and it's all interactive, and that's just really nice. So this is one thing I really am missing when I don't use t three code, and it took me a lot to use this because, well, I didn't I didn't, know, I didn't wanna get into something like a deep, deep system like this. I was really happy with Herder, But I can open up a session on any of my machines at any given point on my personal network.

I can send them to different harnesses. If I wanna update one instance of t three code and all instances of it, I just click a button, and it updates it across all my machines.

Same thing with my harnesses. I'm just clicking update with my harness, all that stuff, and it just works. So for coding, I am using zed, and I'm using zed remote to do any of my actual getting into the code side of things. So same deal there. This is dope. Yeah. The... What you showed in t three code looks awesome. I guess that's that's just a built in way. They have, like... Is it, like, custom card rendering that it taps into, that kind of thing? Yeah. It's just HTML.

Just because it can render HTML in its output, I just instructed my agent to have, like, a a protocol in which it sends information to a script that generates the HTML that I want and then that pops it in there. So it's not having to invent the UI every time.

It's a template that I made then therefore it has like direct inputs and outputs, it knows, okay, this is the format I need to send. And that's all just done via a global context, like a one sentence in global context. Use this template, output in this format, whatever.

It's been working great. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool to see your your to do app because, like, I also have my own custom to do app. I've seen so many posts on X2 of people building their, like, their... Basically, like, life management app, but it's theirs. Like, it's not it's not something you're gonna release to the world. It's like what you use, and it works for your workflow. Because I I built a similar app for my wife and I to use that has, like, to dos and reminders and, like, a chat window. But it's for, like, the workflow that we have haphazardly put together that we've been tripping over in, like,

Google Calendar and, like, Google Keep. But now it's in a one spot... Solid spot, so that's really cool to see. Yeah. And you can share to dos. So I can share to do with Courtney, or I can have them just my own personal ones. They show up on your calendar so that you can drag them onto a specific day. I can add a lot of details to a to do, and then maybe I can maybe I can have an agent chat with it or whatever.

Again, the calendar...

Okay. Good. This is all fake stuff. I was like, I wanna show my whole calendar. So, like, I can have a to do on here and just drag it onto the calendar. So if I have something set to be the deadline today, I can say, oh, I'm gonna do this at this time at this time today or whatever. It's really pretty sick. And then...

So... Oh, one cool thing I built in here, CJ, is I built a little repair UI tool. So I can click this, and then let's say the UI is broken in any way. I can just highlight it and say, here's what went wrong with it. So it's gonna send an actual screenshot.

It's gonna send the DOM, the route, and everything and say, oh, this sucks.

And then it's going to send that to a repair process on my own agent and then automatically merge it. So I... Like, it's made fixing this thing really easily.

Yeah.

Which is really important when you have software your spouse uses. Yeah. That's... I mean, that's the thing. Like, actually, like, we've gotten in arguments... Not arguments, but, like, I've gotten sad at, like, I thought it was working, and then it wasn't working. The amount of text I get, oh, the AI chat is down. The AI chat is down.

Oh, it is? What?

Nice. Yeah. So for my sort of setup, I've used OpenCode for the similar purpose that you're using t three code for. And so if you... If you're not familiar, OpenCode has built in serve. So if you say OpenCode serve, it used to be OpenCode web, but now it's... I think it's just like default in OpenCode two. That is just a background process that you can visit in a web browser and start up sessions and start coding with OpenCode. And so one of the machines on my Proxmox server is a dedicated dev machine. So it's got the most RAM, the most CPU, and that is running OpenCode.

And then all of my projects live on that server. And I just load up open code in the web browser, and it's able to to code on that specific server. Mine are still split, CJ. They... Some are on my MacBook Pro and some are on the Mac Mini, and that's only because that Mac Mini's only got eight gigs of RAM and is underpowered.

Yeah. This MacBook Pro 64 gigs of RAM. So it's like, I I wanna run things on my my, you know, desktop, but, like Right.

It just struggles. Yeah. Definitely. And and, like, that's one of the nice things about having, like, a big beefy machine that you can change the amount of RAM or amount of CPU on the VMs. Because... So for Wait. You can do that. You can change RAM on machines? Like, you have to shut them down. But, yeah, in the settings, you can allocate more RAM or allocate more CPUs. And then when you spin them back up, they have more resources. And so for a couple of projects I was working on, it was running like a giant build build process.

And so that made sense to give it more RAM, give it more CPU for the amount of time that it was running that build process. But, yeah, open code for everything. Like I mentioned earlier, there's that Termix app.

It lets me s... Access any of my servers from the web browser and access their terminal. So that's also very useful.

And then if you're running, like, local AI or you just want to set up, like, a local chat, even if you're talking to, like, cloud hosted AI, OpenWebUI, I have running on a server as well. And this this basically, like, it gives you ChatGPT, but you get to configure it yourself. You install whatever MCP servers you want. You can add users, decide which AI services you connect to, as well as, like, local AI if you have those running. And so this is kind of the way to do it without coding a custom dashboard. Yeah. Like I have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, which which I'm not downplaying because, like, it it makes it better for the stuff that you want to do, but this is definitely more of like a drop in solution of you wanna be able to chat with your local AI or even chat with cloud hosted AI, but set it all up in in the way that you prefer.

One that I haven't used a lot, but I've I've tested is it's now called Vein.

It used to be called Perplexica, but it's basically like a self hosted version of Perplexity Mhmm. Where you get a search box where you can type, it pulls in results, and then it gives you back answers based on those results using AI.

So it's a bit more of like a streamlined open web UI with all of this stuff built in where it can automatically, like, summarize search results and stuff like that. That can also run-in your home lab. And then one of the other pieces of of coding is I use the Versus Code server. So there's a a repo called code dash server. So it's github.com/coder/code-server.

And this is essentially just Versus Code in the web browser. And so that same dev machine that is running OpenCode, if I ever want to be able to see what files it's working on or whatever else, the code server is running there. I can choose the folder. I can navigate just like you would inside of Versus Code, but it's running inside of the of the web browser. So it makes it super convenient.

And then the last piece is a GitHub repo called OpenAI dash OAuth. And so it's from Evan Zhao dev.

And the idea here is you can run this on a server, log in with ChatGPT with your ChatGPT subscription, whether it's, like, your Macs or whatever else, and then that server just stays running and can receive requests just like an OpenAI server would. And so that then allows you to plug that into any other service that needs OpenAI or, like, or needs an OpenAI compatible server without needing to re log in or create a API token. And so I have that running on one server in my home lab. I've logged into ChatGPT once, and now any other service that needs AI can can use that particular proxy. Very cool.

Yeah. Yeah.

Man, I love to hear your setup. It's fun. And folks, what are you running? What are you what are you doing in your home lab? You doing stuff? I wanna know all about it. What are some stuff that we didn't talk about that you find interesting or whatever? I don't have too much else. CJ, do you have anything before we get out of here? That's pretty awesome. No. I I would also ask the audience to roast our setups. Like, if I'm doing something dumb Don't roast myself. Yes.

Yes. Don't roast my head up. But... Yeah. I'm a network admin.

Yeah. Yeah. And but that's, I mean, that's the beauty of of the modern era of use... Being able to use AI for this. You don't have to be an expert. Like, you can you can follow your way through it. You can use AI to help you. But... Yeah. But, yeah, that's all I got. Sick. Alright. Cool. We we will catch you in the next one. Thanks, CJ, for filling in for Wes today.

Yeah.

Later. Peace.