I really like https://karakeep.app/.

I have it plugged into a local Ollama instance for automatic tagging of articles.

I really do not like recommending people chmod 777 anything.

It encourages bad practices.

I don’t often need to mess with PDFs but man StirlingPDF is just fantastic on the odd occasion that I do.

Also, curious - what do you use a download manager like PyLoad for? I’ve seen stuff like this but never found a use case.

Mail server, but mostly because deliverability in this day and age is a nightmare. If you’re some one off running your own mail server in 2023 be prepared to deal with many headaches around IP reputation.

You don’t need to be home for a cron job to run.

USB has a bad habit of randomly dropping off the bus until you reseat the cable or reset the device.

If you’ve got a copy of the data that’s local, why are you opening up ports? Just run the backup job internally.

I’m also not fond of using SBCs as a NAS, by nature their I/O is extremely limited. It will probably work as a backup, but man do I not trust a USB interface at all.

I also recommend not relying on email for notifications - too unreliable. I use the healthchecks.io docker image and have it send me notifications via Pushover when something fails.

All the servers I’ve spun up in the past few years have been Debian instead of my usual Ubuntu.

The last straw was kinda when I learned that installing docker via the install menu gives you the snap version instead of the normal one, with no indication that this is the case.

Nothing is really too much.

I have too much hardware to swap out to go 10G networking or I totally would.

The point of my homelab is for me to learn and break stuff in a safe environment, so if that leads me down a Kubernetes rabbit hole at some point so be it.

If you have a Synology their Surveillance Station product is amazing and will work with basically any IP camera brand.

I’d run my own mail server if deliverability wasn’t such a huge hassle.

Basically if you’re not google or Microsoft… Don’t even bother.

I only rolled my own Wireguard VPN because I wanted to learn how things worked on the backend - I’ve suggested Tailscale to many other people, its just a really well designed product.

It’s astonishing to me how much they’re giving away for free.

I really hope you have that backed up

I’m using DuckDNS, it has a plugin for pfSense / OpnSense.

Someone may have commented this already but my recommendation is to set up an overlay network like tailscale or twingate.

Doesn’t require you to open any ports on your firewall, and Tailscale at least is very performant since it uses Wireguard as it’s underlying protocol. (I have yet to test Twingate but I’ve heard positive things.)

It will require a little more setup per device but it’s honestly incredibly simple and more than secure enough for a home network.

Tailscale also has something called a subnet router which you can use to get incompatible devices onto the tailnet.

Very nice choice of imagery for this community. I often find myself yelling at clouds.