Homelab

Immich offers a refreshing alternative to services like Google Photos by prioritizing privacy and control. As a self-hosted solution, it keeps your photos and videos entirely on your own hardware, avoiding third-party data mining or subscription fees. You get full ownership of your media, support for RAW files, and customizable organization tools—like auto-sorting photos into folders based on dates, cameras, or custom rules. While setup requires some technical work and , it’s a trade-off for avoiding vendor lock-in and ads. Its local AI features (face/object recognition) may not match Google’s polish, but for users valuing transparency and flexibility, Immich is a compelling, ethical choice. ...

Why on Earth Would You Need a Home Server? Whether you’re just dipping your toes into the world of home servers or you’re an IT professional, there are plenty of reasons to consider setting one up. Whether it’s for fun, to break free from the grip of big tech, or simply to explore new possibilities, here are five compelling reasons to get started. And no, you don’t need a massive rack-mounted server—your setup could be as simple as a NAS, a Raspberry Pi, a budget mini PC, or even an old computer lying around. ...

Today I’ll be showing you how it can actually be pretty simple to get a self hosted monitoring system set up for your home lab. The idea is to collect and visualize key data about your machines, like how much CPU, RAM, and disk capacity is being used over time. Having monitoring in place can be really useful for understanding if there are adequate resources dedicated to your various services, and it can also just be a lot of fun to look at. Before we go any further, here’s a sample screen shot of what our end result will look like: ...

NixOS is a Linux distribution based on the Nix package manager. Nix has been trending lately so there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it. But if you went to do some research about Nix you might have gotten a bit lost in concepts like dependency trees and the Nix programming language. The good news is that you don’t need to understand how Nix works in depth or know any programming to enjoy the benefits that it brings. Nix has a repo of about 80,000 packages, which puts it up there with the Arch Linux AUR as a contender for the largest in the Linux ecosystem. You can actually use Nix on top of any distro and even MacOS, but today we’ll be focusing on NixOS specifically. First, I’ll tell you a bit about what makes Nix special, and then I’ll demonstrate a basic server installation to show how it works in practice. ...

If you’ve been following recent videos on TechHut, you probably know we’re big Docker fans. Whether it’s media servers, analytic tools, web services, or download clients, most applications demoed on the channel are running in Docker containers. In this post, we’ll go over the why, the how, and some of the basics you need to know to start using Docker and implementing it in your network. What is Docker? But first, what is it? Docker is a platform that allows you to work with containers and containerized applications. In the world of software and servers, a container is an isolated environment that generally has a single primary application running inside. Containers allow developers and system administrators to create and deploy reproducible images that are similar to packages from a distro’s package manager. However, containers don’t rely at all on libraries or dependencies from the host system–they come with everything required to run a given application in a known working configuration. ...

Creating a basic Apache web server is often the first step in your web development journey. Apache is the base requirement for many web applications and products. Better yet, you can use an Apache web server to host your self-made or generated static websites with something like HUGO. In this video, we will be using Linode to host the server. You can use any VPS provider or even do this on your own hardware. Linode sponsors the companion video attached to this article, and if you use our link, you can get a $100 60-day credit. Below is the full video with all the steps and commands needed. ...

Near the end of 2020, Red Hat decided to kill CentOS as we know it—kind of. We’ll get that a bit later. But for now, let’s examine Red Hat Enterprise Linux and all of the clones and forks that we have available. So, let’s get to it. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL for short, is a Linux distribution developed by, believe it or not, Red Hat. RHEL is an RPM-based distribution that uses the DNF package manager and follows a more LTS-like release cycle with an older package base. RHEL’s package base actually comes from earlier versions of Fedora, making Fedora a testing ground for different changes that may come to Red Hat. For example, the latest version of RHEL 9.0 is based on Fedora 34 from March 2021. Do note, though, that while Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat and uses some Red Hat infrastructure, Fedora is still its own project that may make decisions against Red Hat. Another thing that makes Red Hat special is that a lot of modern technology in the Linux world is either significantly funded by Red Hat or run or heavily contributed to by Red Hat developers, A bunch of examples of this include GNOME Shell, SELinux, SystemD, PackageKit, Wayland, D-Bus, and many other projects. However, another thing that made Red Hat different is that it’s a paid Linux distro, but paying for it gives you support and docs from the Red Hat company. ...

Nothing is better than sitting back and playing some of your favorite games when you were a kid, or even better, showing the next generation some awesome games we grew up with. In this guide, we will set up our RetroPie console using the Raspberry Pi 4. Depending on the Pi you have, you may be able to emulate old arcade games all the way up to Play Station 1 and N64 games. RetroPie itself allows us to emulate a good number of older consoles. Before we get into the setup, let’s talk about what you’ll actually need to accomplish this. ...

If you have an old or cheap computer lying around, you should put it to work and create a nice home media server. In this video, we will use Ubuntu server 20.04 and PLEX to stream media easily throughout your home and even when you’re out on the go. Once you have everything set up, you’re not just limited to media. You can use this to run Nextcloud or any other server application. ...