Homelab Introduction

One of the main conveniences of modern life is the ability to access your personal and professional files — documents, photos, music, videos and more — wherever you are.

Google Workspace, Office 365, and other services offer increasingly popular alternatives to local storage on a computer, tablet, or smartphone, thanks to the cross location and cross device access provided by the Internet. However, it is fair to question the safety, security, and economics of these cloud hosted services.

Some services openly indicate that they analyze your data, share it with third parties, and are free to change privacy terms in the future. There’s historical precedent for data breaches, price increases, and even total service shutdowns.

If you want to enjoy the benefits of universal access while maintaining complete control over your own data, you might consider hosting and managing your own online services. The necessary software can be found in free available projects. This series is going to cover the process of hosting a curated list of free and open source software to run in your own homelab.

This will be a multi-part series that will cover shared data access with personal governance, along with privacy-respecting home automation, entertainment media hosting, and environment monitoring.

In the end I aim to create an enterprise-like deployment of this software, without compromises in regards to security, reliability, and ease-of-use. While this series of blog posts covering the deployment will be fairly technical, our end goal is to create a system that anyone, techies and non-techie family members alike can use, while keeping their data safe and secure.

This journey will also be an opportunity to learn about technology and general techniques that might be useful even in larger commercial applications if you work in the IT industry.