My homelab is where everyday tools become something I can understand and look after: Immich for photos, Paperless-ngx for documents, Jellyfin for media, and storage shared between them. It is less about collecting servers and more about making a useful little system at home.
Why it exists
I wanted a place to run useful services on my own terms, learn how their parts fit together, and give my smaller hardware and software projects somewhere to live.
How it fits together
Proxmox provides the compute, Docker hosts the applications, and TrueNAS provides shared storage. Pi-hole handles local names, Nginx Proxy Manager routes services, and Tailscale provides a private way back home.
An ongoing practice
Keeping the lab useful means documenting changes, checking storage dependencies, and treating backups and recovery as work of their own. A service responding and a successful restore are different milestones.
