I have a pi 4 running HAOS, I have an 8 gb pi 5 running a bunch of services, with head room to spare. I have a pi 5 with 4gb ram running Jellyfin with headroom to spare. Both pi 5’s are also running pihole.

I also have a pi 5 with 2gb that will hopefully handle my personal blog and email, hopefully! I have a pi 5 with 1 gb showing up on Thursday that will run my OpenWRT and LuCI. I had a pi zero 2 that handled wireguard but it could only handle it for DNS, with OpenWRT on a pi 5 I will be able to do more than just DNS over wireguard.

I personally have a handful of pi’s doing things, with plans to get more to do more (I have one in the mail to become my OpenWRT router). I was thinking of getting something simple to be able to do STT and TTS as I want to replace my HomePods as I slowly leave Apple and have have no interest in joining Amazon or Google for home automation, so I looked at my university’s used computers. I am not really a fan of buying some random persons old hardware but maybe a business is selling their old stuff.

I heard that it was going 10x 🤪. My suggestion get a pihole and don’t pay the, checks calculation $0.00, plus you get ad blocking on a lot of the web.

Did something to import all my photos to nextcloud, sorry do not remember what I did but was unhappy with how my devices were not syncing that fast. Then I found immich and just put them there, still not as fast as Apple photos but faster than nextcloud.

I am unfamiliar with Ente, as I use immich to replace my apple photos and it runs great on a pi 5. I only have the stuff backed up locally in a few different places and some of my things on my phone like passwords and pictures. I want to get a pi 4 to act as an offsite place to back up my stuff. My homelab runs off of 4 or 5 different pi’s, I have pretty much degoogled my life, I want to de-apple myself as well.

I run nextcloud and a few other things comfortably on a pi 5 Not sure how much ram it has I think maybe 4?

I have my own domains, but I do not use them for Jellyfin. I use Jellyfin on my lan or over my personal VPN.

Yes I am aware one of my static IPs has 25 unblocked.

Every self hoster will say start with something, like… and another will disagree.

My suggestion is look at what you have and think about what you want to do, and go from there.

I personally did not do that, so take what I said with a grain of salt, I saw ads that where super targeted at me and started to get a whole lot annoyed. This annoyance got me to buy a pi zero and started hosting pihole on my network, I did something and the SD card got fried so I got a pi 4 to replace the thing not yet realizing I probably just needed a new SD card. I got grumpy that some ads where getting through so I got another pi 4 to act as a secondary pihole.

I now can say that I have 1 pi zero 2 running wireguard just for DNS, 2 pi 5’s running pihole 1 of them also runs my Jellyfin server and sails the high seas for me while the other one has some other services doing other things. I also have a pi 4 running HAOS, as I try so hard to get out of proprietary systems. I plan on getting another pi 5 to be my firewall and another to act as my blog/email server.

Cool did not know that I will have to look into that when I set up my pi 5 firewall.

I just use wireguard, no there is no simple GUI or anything like that. I also run it bare metal no docker.

It currently sits on a pi zero 2, it has just enough power to use my pihole DNS’s. I plan on moving it to a pi 5 whenever I get around to building my firewall.

Yes it is something like this, I do not have all of my emails go to paperless-ngx that would probably kill my little home lab.

I deal with a lot of financial and insurance things, having them go automatically to paperless-ngx was the plan but then I saw what I could do with automation and I spent hours setting up automation. As this is all new to me and I am dealing with some recent flooding I did not want to need to remember to start forwarding things I needed saved as pdf’s.

The automations include things that should not be forwarded to the paperless accounts, then each of the paperless accounts have rules on what to block if something slips through.

I got an unlimitted email package from a host, before my journey into self hosting. I use a different email address for everything I sign up to or need to confirm I am human with. They all forward to 6 or 7 different emails I check I have just decided that those email addresses would forward to paperless email address to keep stuff sorted.

*edit I get next to no spam, if I do I either close the email or tell the company they have had a data leak and close the email.

My scripts work together to find news stories in different RSS feeds and web pages combines them all together and than emails stuff to me, the same news stories should not show up in different emails.

I wrote python scripts that run on my pi

It is a python script that runs on my pi, Claude just helped me fix my errors and replicate it.

It searches multiple places and does not include things in previous emails, or stories in more than one outlet. Yes RSS would be easier but that is multiple streams.

In the not to distant future I will be retiring wireguard from that pi zero 2 and turning it into a pots server. I have grand ambitions to make a better home lab with a few more pi’s and to help me get away from big tech more.

The only thing google I have is an email I do not use but so I can watch YouTube, but I use unwatched to block ads.

The only thing apple is my iPhone and my iPad, when it becomes time to replace those I will have to figure out graphenOS and some Linux distro for a tablet of some sort.

I actually have Wireguard running on a pi zero 2, all it really does is provide me my pihole DNS.

Edit:

I should say I have pihole running on a couple of pi 5’s currently, overkill yes but one of my pi 4’s was sacrificed to the whims of magic smoke another was donated to a friend and another now hosts HAOS, I have a few pi zero 2’s (only one was sacrificial) the one that hosts wireguard has one of my last few working SD cards. The pi 5’s host many other things other than just pihole.

So my home lab has been raspberry pi’s of varying shapes and numbers for a few years. Recently my single floor condo flooded so half of my place has been ripped up and so much crap has been stuffed in the other half I decided I should get around to planning out a more complete home lab setup. Money is a bit tight but I called up my ISP and it turns out my internet package comes with two static IP addresses so I decided to snap those up. I will be building up a firewall with a pi 5, I will continue to use a pi 4 I have running HAOS, as I try to get out of all the ecosystems. I was born into the Apple ecosystem, the first computer I remember using was some old Apple DOS computer, so breaking out of that walled garden is going to be tough but it helps that Tim Apple gave Trump a golden Apple plaque so it hurts less with every service I turn off.

Any who because I have had a lot of time to make plans and game through my plan with AI I have decided I am going to self host my domain and email (Simple blog and 200+ annonomized email addresses) on a pi 5 that will be the third pi 5 after my firewall the first pi 5 will host things like immich, nextcloud, and the other things it is already doing one of those other things is pihole and that is where my DHCP is currently, I am on the fence about moving it to opnwrt or not. The Second pi 5 after the firewall also hosts a secondary pihole as a back up dns and all my high seas (like sonarr.tv) things and jellyfin.

To top it all off I am going to get another pi 4 with a hdd and I will ask for it to be hosted some where to do off site back ups.