Homelabbing: 2026 Edition
What is homelabbing?
Why would you want to self-host?
- Learn & Experiment
- Security?
- Networking?
- Privacy & Control
- Cost Savings (debatable)
Great! But I don’t have any hardware…
- This is slightly more difficult in the big ‘26
- Old desktops/laptops
- Ebay
- Goodwill
- Facebook Marketplace - Massanutten Tech
- Cheap SBC
- Raspberry Pi
- OrangePi Zero 4
- RockPro64
- ODROID-H4
- VPS
- ESP-32 (ESPHome)
Challenges of Homelabbing
- Security & Maintenance
- Storage Redundancy
- Network Configuration
- Learning Curve - lots of new concepts
RAID
ZFS
- Similar modes to RAID - different names
- Auto-fixing corruption with checksums
- CoW - safer from power loss
- Instant snapshots
- Typically more performant (compression + caching)
Services
- Immich https://demo.immich.app
- Wakapi
- Home Assistant
- Streaming
- Jellyfin
- Plex
- *arr suite
- Dawarich
- Game Servers
Homelab Interfaces
- CasaOS
- Proxmox
- TrueNAS
- Portainer
- NixOS…
NixOS
Why NixOS for Homelabbing?
- Declarative Infrastructure: Entire OS & services configured in code, you can forget all your commands
- GitOps Ready: Keep your whole homelab state versioned in Git
- Fearless Experimentation: Try new software without polluting your host OS with nix-shell
What Makes NixOS Better & Easier?
- Instant Rollbacks: Reboot into a working state in < 10 seconds if an update breaks
- Reproducible: Spin up a second server using the exact same config
- No Config Drift: What’s in the config is what’s running—nothing more, nothing less
Example nix module
{ fleetSettings, ... }: {
virtualisation.oci-containers = {
backend = "podman";
containers = {
# Original Hypermind
hypermind = {
image = "ghcr.io/lklynet/hypermind:latest";
# use host networking for Hyperswarm DHT to find peers
extraOptions = [ "--network=host" ];
environment = {
PORT = toString fleetSettings.sequoia.ports.hypermind;
ENABLE_CHAT = "true";
ENABLE_MAP = "true";
};
};
# Hypermind Swarm
hypermind-swarm = {
image = "ghcr.io/lklynet/hypermind-swarm:latest";
extraOptions = [ "--network=host" ];
environment = {
PORT = toString fleetSettings.sequoia.ports.hyperswarm;
};
};
};
};
}
Exposing Your Services to the Internet
- Tailscale
- Reverse Proxy
Reverse Proxy Options
- Game Servers (Playit or Oracle)
- Web Services (Cloudflare Tunnel¹ or Oracle)
- Cloudflare: Need Domain
- Oracle: Can use domain, may need credit card to get access
- More complex to set up (wireguard setup for web, manual NAT with iptables for game servers)
- Need a tutorial to navigate the Oracle Cloud UI
- Wireguard
How to get started
- Define your goals (what and why do you want to host?)
- Start with the hardware you have (or buy some very cheap, used hardware)
- Learn as you go (break things and learn to fix them)