Homelab

A small home lab where I self-host the things I use every day and learn by running them myself. Everything is defined as code and reconciled from Git. The repo goes public the day I stop being embarrassed by my own setup, so do not hold your breath.

What I run

• Immich: self-hosted photo and video library, using the Intel iGPU for hardware transcoding.
• Tailscale: private access to everything from anywhere, with nothing exposed to the public internet.
• More to come: new services get added over time as I find things worth self-hosting.

Hardware

• Intel N150 mini PC, single node
• 16GB RAM
• 500GB NVMe (boot) and 1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe (data)

Stack

• OS: Talos Linux, immutable and managed only through its API (talosctl and MachineConfig patches).
• Kubernetes: upstream Kubernetes via Talos.
• GitOps: Flux CD reconciles cluster state from Git.
• Access and TLS: Tailscale, plus cert-manager with Let’s Encrypt DNS-01 through Cloudflare for trusted wildcard certificates.
• Secrets: SOPS with age keys, encrypted in the repo.
• Hardware acceleration: Intel iGPU QuickSync (/dev/dri) passed through to workloads such as Immich and Jellyfin.
• Backups: VolSync/Restic for stateful workloads, targeting cloud object storage (Backblaze B2/S3).