My Homelab: The Software

The software stack is as important of a choice as the hardware, arguably, what software you decide to run is more important than choosing the hardware itself. sometimes, the choice of software is the make or break decision when it comes to deploying reliable infra in Home lab.

Linux is the the absolute front runner when it comes to choosing an OS for servers, a vast majority of infrastructure is powered by some flavor of Linux and my home lab is no different, below is a breakdown of all the software I have running in my homelab from OS to Stacks.

The Routing: Since the very beginning of my homelab, my routing stack has been consistent, I have been running mikrotik's RouterOS on their hardware for the longest time, it is a very flexible piece of software with virtually endless possibilities, even a decade and a half of using mikrotik daily, I am still learning new thing about it's capabilities, and mikrotik is absolutely chad because they keep on adding features that you didn't know you wanted.

The Servers: All my servers' host OS is debian, except for NAS, which is TrueNAS CE (which too is debian based), chosen primarily for reliability.

The Workstations: These days I am running bazzite on my workstations, this is a shift from fedora that I have been using since last 4-5 years.

My Handheld and Laptop are still Windows 11, albeit debloated, but in the near future these may get the linux treatment, for now , I need some windows machines for work and the games that don't play nicely with bazzite.

The NVR: My NVR of choice is frigate, and since this machine has ample headroom, I am also running moondream on ollama for some AI classification. besides, this machine also hosts immich's machine learning container which works as a sidecar to my main immich app on the NAS.

The NAS: As described on the hardware overview, it is TrueNAS CE, it has a bunch of Apps, including but not limited to: Home Assistant, Immich, Jellyfin, SearXNG and Nginx Proxy Manager.

I also have 2 Cloud VMs (one in VULTR DEL and another on Hetzner HEL). One is dedicated to Pangolin, also hosting a rustdesk server. The other hosts some websites, including this one.

How have you stacked your own homelab? share your thoughts!