You can set up firewall rules to redirect the traffic destined for public DNS servers to your internal DNS server.

Not sure how to construct that rule in the unifi firewall but it comes down to “any outbound traffic on port 53 that’s not destined for the adguard server, redirect it.”

I just use ssh for management. Monitoring is handled by nagios.

Mail server, but mostly because deliverability in this day and age is a nightmare. If you’re some one off running your own mail server in 2023 be prepared to deal with many headaches around IP reputation.

You don’t need to be home for a cron job to run.

USB has a bad habit of randomly dropping off the bus until you reseat the cable or reset the device.

If you’ve got a copy of the data that’s local, why are you opening up ports? Just run the backup job internally.

I’m also not fond of using SBCs as a NAS, by nature their I/O is extremely limited. It will probably work as a backup, but man do I not trust a USB interface at all.

I also recommend not relying on email for notifications - too unreliable. I use the healthchecks.io docker image and have it send me notifications via Pushover when something fails.

Windows 11 on the main desktop for gaming reasons. Currently Pop_OS on the laptop, considering moving to Arch. My servers all run Debian or Ubuntu.

Doesn’t come with a power adapter and has weird power requirements. Wouldn’t power up at all with a standard 5V 1A wall plug, needed 5V 4A.

Apart from that it’s been perfectly fine. I wish other OS than the armbian they provide supported this CPU.

freshRSS. I’m using the linuxserver.io docker image.

Nothing is really too much.

I have too much hardware to swap out to go 10G networking or I totally would.

The point of my homelab is for me to learn and break stuff in a safe environment, so if that leads me down a Kubernetes rabbit hole at some point so be it.

If you have a Synology their Surveillance Station product is amazing and will work with basically any IP camera brand.

I’d run my own mail server if deliverability wasn’t such a huge hassle.

Basically if you’re not google or Microsoft… Don’t even bother.

I only rolled my own Wireguard VPN because I wanted to learn how things worked on the backend - I’ve suggested Tailscale to many other people, its just a really well designed product.

It’s astonishing to me how much they’re giving away for free.

I’ve been testing some alternative SBCs like the OrangePi 5.

Currently mine is a fallback DNS server and reverse proxy for my network, trying to come up with some other uses for it.

They’re still low power ARM boxes, but they’re much cheaper than the RPi is at the moment.

I have an rsync script that pulls a backup every night from my truenas server to my Synology.

I’ve been thinking about setting up something with rsync.net so I have a cloud copy of my most important files.

I really hope you have that backed up

I’m using DuckDNS, it has a plugin for pfSense / OpnSense.

• Bitwarden - Password manager
• Dark Reader - Dark mode everywhere
• FakeSpot - spotting fake amazon reviews, etc
• OneTab - because otherwise I have hundreds of tabs open. At least this lets me pretend at organization.
• RSS Subscription Extension - get RSS urls with one click.
• Vimium - Vim controls in the browser
• uBlock Origin - ad blocker
• User Agent Switcher - switch browser user agent.

Someone may have commented this already but my recommendation is to set up an overlay network like tailscale or twingate.

Doesn’t require you to open any ports on your firewall, and Tailscale at least is very performant since it uses Wireguard as it’s underlying protocol. (I have yet to test Twingate but I’ve heard positive things.)

It will require a little more setup per device but it’s honestly incredibly simple and more than secure enough for a home network.

Tailscale also has something called a subnet router which you can use to get incompatible devices onto the tailnet.