Okay, where to start?⌗

Hmm, let me think, maybe I’ll start by describing my homelab, where this blog is hosted.

The Beginning:⌗

It all started with a Raspberry Pi 3 around 2017 or later. Initially, I just used it as embedded hardware, playing with Python 3 and GPIO for educational projects like turning on LEDs through a web interface and similar stuff.

Then I discovered Nextcloud, which seemed amazing to me, so I tried deploying an instance on my Raspberry Pi—and it worked! But back in 2017, I had an FWA internet connection, so no port forwarding for me :-( I didn’t like the idea of using my Nextcloud instance only locally like a dumb NAS.

The FTTH!!!⌗

Finally!!! In 2021, fiber arrived, so I could finally do port forwarding and get a public IP. That was the beginning of my deep dive into this amazing world. I successfully hosted a fully working Nextcloud instance on the Raspberry Pi. I installed everything from scratch using the official Nextcloud documentation, setting up PHP, the database, and the server settings manually. I learned a lot from this experience.

I NEED moreeeeeeee!⌗

After a few weeks, I watched a YouTube video about RAID—and I had to have it! As I kept “nerding out,” I discovered the ZFS filesystem, which became the foundation for my RAID setup.

I bought 3×2TB Western Digital Purple drives, which are designed for surveillance purposes, but in my opinion, they were a good balance between reliability and affordability. Since they’re CMR drives, I shouldn’t have any issues with replication.

With the disks ready, I dusted off an old desktop PC, installed Ubuntu Server on it, set up a ZFS pool, and reinstalled Nextcloud. I added a DuckDNS domain for dynamic DNS and manually set up an SSL certificate using Let’s Encrypt.

Then I discovered Docker containers, which pulled me even deeper into self-hosting. I started exploring everything I could host myself, awesome selfhosted bacame my best friend, haha.

The situation now⌗

From there, things kept growing. Now, I have a 19" rack full of amazing networking gear and a full-size enterprise server running tons of VMs, containers, and services across two different domains.

My actual rack:⌗