Jun 6 2025
technical howto

My homelab

My Raspberry Pi homelab with an overview of services I self-host.

Hardware and software 🔗︎

I have 3 disks connected to my Raspberry Pi 4b (1 GB model) and cockpit (with file sharing and podman addons) to manage it graphically from any device without the need of SSH.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) 🔗︎

On the first disk that is mounted in /srv I have my samba share connected to /srv/smb, but other services in /srv/<service_name>. I’m using cockpit-file-sharing to ease setting it up. I also have cron jobs with rsync to copy my data on other disks.

TIP: To set up a new user for SMB share: sudo smbpasswd -a $USER and sudo smbpasswd -e $USER.

Reverse proxy 🔗︎

I tried setting up Adguard Home with Nginx Proxy Manager, but couldn’t get DNS rewrites and reverse proxy to work, so I left it. I also don’t have admin access to the router, and after calling my ISP they said they cannot set up any custom DNS, nor set a static address, great…

My quasi-solution is to use mDNS on the Pi, so that I can use the hostname.local:PORT to access it, while it’s IP changes.

Music library 🔗︎

I’m using Navidrome to organize and access my music library.

Personal knowledge base/notes 🔗︎

I’m using silverbullet, because I wanted something simple with Markdown support (it’s super extensive which I think will be of use in the future).

Media server 🔗︎

I’ve set up Jellyfin server on it and it works great without transcoding.

TIP: If you are using mDNS then instead of network_mode: host in the example docker-compose file you can simply forward the 8096 port.

RSS Reader 🔗︎

I’m using FreshRSS to manage and read RSS feeds.

Password Manager 🔗︎

Since I don’t have a reverse proxy I can’t set up a secure HTTPS connections and using a password manager while leaking passwords would be meaningless.

Calendar 🔗︎

I’m using Baikal to have a CalDAV server that can be used across my devices.

Media tracker 🔗︎

To track my media usage (or more likely store information about my recently consumed media) I’m using Yamtrack.

Dashboard 🔗︎

To get an overview of all of my services I’m using mafl as my dashboard, which is conveniently served at the port 80 for easy access.

Anki sync server 🔗︎

I’m also self-hosting my own Anki sync server to sync Anki decks across my devices.

Systemd units 🔗︎

Since I’m running rootless podman containers and podman systemd generate is now deprecated I’m using Quadlet to run containers as systemd services. This guide shows how to work with them and podlet can help you generate .container files for your containers. That way I can set it up to run after (re)boot and enable other options like auto-update.

Other tips 🔗︎

• Use nmap to find the Pi’s IP address if you don’t have an access to your router.
• Check out powertop in order to disable power saving features.
• Enable lingering to avoid shutting down user processes after logging out of the system.
• If you can’t connect to hostname.local in the browser on Linux, but can ssh into it then it means that your distro doesn’t have mDNS enabled/started.

Well, it took some time to arrange, but I’m happy that I’m using so many services without relaying on third-parties.