ariazonaa@obsidian
A homelab kept online by one person, for one person — my mail, my files, my chat, this page. Nothing here is for hire; it's just the log. Press 0–5 or h/l to switch workspaces.
$ cat ~/README
Somewhere in Germany, in a room with too many terminals open. The first thing I ever kept online was a Minecraft server on a hand-me-down desktop — it fell over constantly, and figuring out why is more or less how I ended up here.
Current footprint: one dedicated server plus a handful of VMs scattered across hosters. It runs my mail, my files, my chat backends and this page. Nobody else depends on it, which is exactly the point — I get to break things on a Tuesday.
Why I run it myself instead of clicking a checkbox somewhere: managed services keep surprising me. Pricing pages change, free tiers disappear, APIs deprecate without notice. My setup hasn’t surprised me in a year — and when it does, the logs are on my disk.
The part I actually like: tracing a slow request from the edge through nginx, into the container, into postgres, and finding out it was a missing index the whole time. There’s no ticket, no customer and no deadline attached to that. That’s why it’s fun.
$ ls ~/stack # what’s on the box · not a skills list
A — platform
DebianOS · base layer
Proxmox VEhypervisor · KVM
Dockercontainer runtime
Portainercontainer management
Nginxreverse proxy · TLS
WireGuardVPN · tunnels
PostgreSQLdatabases
Valkey / Rediscaches · queues
B — operations
Autheliaaccess · SSO + 2FA
Proxmox Backupbackups · verified
Grafanaobservability
InfluxDBmetrics store
Uptime Kumauptime monitor
AdGuard HomeDNS · filtering
PatchMonpatch monitoring
DiDiunimage update notices
WGDashboardVPN · overview
SpSmokepinglatency graphs
C — services
Mailcowself-hosted mail
Giteacode hosting · + Actions runner
Matrixmessaging · Synapse
Vaultwardenpassword vault
Jellyfinmedia streaming
Immichphotos · + ML
Linkwardenbookmarks · archive
Wiki.jswiki · notes
MeTubevideo downloads · yt-dlp
CxConvertXfile conversion
Bichonmail archive
D — workbench
code-serverVS Code · in the browser
Firefoxbrowser · in a container
Calagopusgame servers · panel
9routerLLM API router
HrHeadroomLLM context proxy
E — self-built
● 41 services · 1 host · maintained by exactly one person
$ less ~/log.md # newest first
Gitea crawled — two seconds to render a repo page. I blamed the edge, then the container, then my own network, and spent an evening tcpdumping the wrong hop. It was a table that had quietly grown past a million rows without an index. One CREATE INDEX later it was back to normal. Note to self: measure every hop before guessing at any of them.
Nearly deployed a whole thing to do one job. Wrote 20 lines of bash and a cron entry instead. It has been running since, needs no updates, no backups of its own and no reverse-proxy entry. About half the time this works; the other half I end up installing the real thing anyway, grumbling.
nginx logs every request, Grafana graphs the metrics, Uptime Kuma pings every endpoint — and none of it helps if nobody looks. Made it a weekly habit to read everything WARN-and-above. Two of the last three things that woke me up had been complaining in the logs for days beforehand.
Rebuilt the box after a disk swap and briefly considered making it interesting — new distro, new orchestration, the works. Put Debian, systemd, nginx and postgres back on instead. It has not woken me up since. Unimpressive on paper, and that appears to be the feature.
~/log.md (END)
$ cat ~/.contacts # click to open · or copy to clipboard
These channels reach me directly. Pick one.
$
$ ls ~/src # things I wrote · open source
$ open github.com/Ariazonaa