I run a home lab to self-host a handful of services. My goal in doing this is to own my data and pick up some basic IT/Networking/Ops experience. My home lab all lives in one network. It spans several devices and services. This document outlines things at a high-level. Deeper in this repo you'll find configuration for different services.
- Verizon FiOS ONT - This is the WAN network ingress/egress
- Gigabit wired router - I use a mikrotik router.
- Switch - This is also a mikrotik.
- Wireless AP x2 - I run two ubiquiti gigabit wireless access points on different sides of my house. There's a masonry column in the middle of my house that forms a wifi shadow if I only run one access point. I run one on each side of it for better coverage. Both emit the same SSID but on different channels.
- Uninterruptible power supply - Items 1-4 all run on this. They run over a mixture of power cords and PoE. There's enough in the battery for several hours of power loss.
- Wireless Router - I use a mikrotik router as a wireless bridge to some additional devices where it's a pain to run a wire. This runs in pseudo-bridge mode and I'm still experimenting with it.
This is the heart of my home lab setup. I have a Orange Pi 5 Plus running Armbian. It is low power so I am content leaving it running 24/7. This is also on the UPS run so it won't be interrupted by intermittent power losses.
I run a number of services on this machine:
- Portainer is a web ui and management system for docker-based containerized workloads. I use it to orchestrate most of the following services.
- Pi Hole is a dns server that swallows requests to known ad networks, making it serve as a network-wide adblocker. Internally I use static IPs and dns. This makes for easy setup of custom dns records.
- Photoprism is a server that catalogs images. There a few services under its umbrella, including a WebDAV server where you can sync files to/from your devices, workers that index and run machine learning algorithms against your photos, and a webapp to actually view the images.
- I use Photosync on both android and ios to push my photos from mobile devices. This works like a cheapo version of cloud consumer photo syncing.
- I wrote my own public photo-sharing capabilities into my personal website a few years ago. Photoprism has since added their own capabilities, but I still kind of prefer the way I went about it.
- Home Assistant is a service that records and serves metrics on devices. I use it to record power usage of my devices. I use several plugs that utilize esphome firmware so that I have greater control of the data being collected by these devices.
In June 2025 a text to speech(TTS) AI model named chatterbox was released. I stumbled upon a project that packaged it in a docker compose file alongside a webserver. After a little tinkering I had my own server running and I quickly found myself getting a kick out of generating ai voice material. Soon after I built a new machine with dedicated hardware to run it.
- Chatterbox-TTS is the original repo for this project. I made my own alterations to it, which I intend to codify as a fork. I'll update this with a link to that when I get there.
- Currently I run the chatterbox tts webserver on the public internet from my house at a cheapo domain using a cert from letsencrypt. It's just secured with basic auth. I only leave it running when in use or when I'm at friends and plan to use it there. I have a few plans for this:
- Put it behind a reverse proxy so that the proxy is responsible for tls termination and authentication
- Create a separate service, also behind a reverse proxy, that allows for remotely starting the machine and service.
- Similarly, create a service that automatically powers off the high-power servrt after a period of inactivity so that it isn't needlessly consuming electricity. It would be convenient to have a cron system where you book a certain amount of time to keep it awake and then have it otherwise keep it turned off. As far as I've been able to tell this seems to be complicated by my current network topology, and wake on lan doesn't consistently work because this server runs on a flaky wireless bridge.
- I don't have a great backup solution for my photos. I currently make a couple copies every december 31 on various hard drives and I also burn a blue ray disc with that year's worth of photos. I intend to set up a cron to regularly sync these files to a service like S3 to have more peace of mind.
- It would also be nice to hook up more automation between photoprism and my personal photo sharing site so as to not have to manually do a number of steps to deploy new content.