iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 23h

Comparing self-hosted password managers? Vaultwarden, KeePassXC, Passbolt, and self-hosted Bitwarden solve different problems: solo users, teams, no server at all, compliance. Where each one actually fits: budgethomelab.com/articles/best-self-hosted-password-managers/ #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Real question: which container in your lab have you never once updated? Not the one you know you are behind on. The one that came up working and dropped out of your head completely. Mine was FreshRSS. Eleven months, never touched. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Four people streaming, CPU pinned at 100%, and the iGPU you already paid for sitting idle. QuickSync passthrough into a container, the /dev/dri part nobody explains, and how to confirm it is really offloading: budgethomelab.com/guides/jellyfin-hardware-transcoding-quicksync/ #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Hot take: the box holding your family photos should be boring. If you are learning something new on it every week, that is a lab, not storage. Keep one host you break on purpose and one you do not touch. The second one is the whole point. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Tip: a fresh Proxmox install points at the enterprise repo you have no subscription for. apt update errors out, and the host quietly stops getting security updates. Disable that repo, add the no-subscription one, run apt update. Day one job. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Two $25 managed switches on the same shelf, and only one of them does what you came for. TL-SG108E vs GS308E: VLAN tagging in practice, the web UI you actually have to live with, and which one I would buy again. budgethomelab.com/articles/tl-sg108e-vs-netgear-gs308e/ #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Tip: check /boot on any Debian or Proxmox host you have run for a year. Old kernels stack up in a small separate partition, it fills, and then apt fails partway through an upgrade. apt autoremove --purge clears them. Do it before it breaks, not after. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Home Assistant Cloud is $6.50 a month, largely so you can reach your own house from outside it. A reverse proxy or Tailscale does that for free and the traffic stays yours. That is $78 a year for remote access to hardware already sitting in your closet. #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Real question: which piece of used hardware turned out to be a mistake? Not the deal that worked out. The one you bought on price and quietly replaced. Power draw, noise, a dead-end socket, a drive with nothing left in it. What was it? #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Encrypted offsite backup for a couple dollars a month, and you can pull back one file instead of a whole disk image. restic end to end: repo setup, snapshots, dedupe, retention with forget and prune, and the B2 side: budgethomelab.com/guides/restic-homelab-backups/ #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Hot take: uptime is the wrong thing to brag about at home. Nobody is paying you for nines. What matters is how fast you can put it back, and most people have never actually timed that. Chase recovery time, not a streak. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Tip: on any used SFF or mini PC, go into BIOS and set AC power recovery to On. The factory default leaves the box off after a power cut, so the lab stays down until someone walks over and presses a button. A lot of remote-hands trips are just this setting. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Used SFF listings all look the same until you notice one takes a 2.5in drive and the other does not. M720q, M920q, OptiPlex Micro: what each fits, which CPU is worth paying for, and where the cheap one bites you. budgethomelab.com/articles/used-sff-thinkcentre-vs-optiplex-homelab/ #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Tip: Proxmox snapshots only work on storage backends that support them: ZFS, LVM-thin, Ceph. Point a VM's disk at plain directory storage and the snapshot button is just decoration, it will fail when you actually need it. Check your storage type before you trust it. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Cloud backup storage runs about $6 a TB, per month, forever. A refurbished 4TB drive is a one-time $60 to $80. Rent capacity forever or buy it once and just replace the disk when it dies. The math favors owning it almost every time. #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Real question: single Proxmox host or a cluster? Not what you'd tell someone starting out. What you actually run today, and the real reason you haven't changed it. Mine's still one box, mostly because quorum for a homelab of one felt like overhead I didn't need. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

A snapshot on the same disk as the VM it protects is not a backup plan. Wrote up putting Proxmox Backup Server on separate hardware, prune vs garbage collection, and why an untested restore is just an assumption: budgethomelab.com/guides/proxmox-backup-server-setup/ #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Hot take: Pi-hole isn't really about blocking ads. It's the only place in the house that shows you what every device is quietly phoning home to, and how often. The query log is the feature. Blocking is just the side effect people notice first. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Tip: .local hostnames rely on mDNS, which is link-local and does not cross VLANs. Segment your network and every Bonjour/Avahi device announcing itself as something.local goes silent on the other side unless you run a reflector. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Everyone asks if self-hosting is worth it and wants a dollar number. I've run that math plenty: it's close enough to a wash it shouldn't decide anything. What actually predicts a happy homelab in three years is temperament: budgethomelab.com/articles/is-self-hosting-worth-it/ #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Tip: on Proxmox with ZFS, cap the ARC. The default hands half your RAM to cache before a single VM boots, so a 16GB mini PC loses 8GB to it. Set zfs_arc_max in /etc/modprobe.d/zfs.conf, then run update-initramfs -u. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Plex wants a subscription before it will transcode on hardware you bought, in a closet you pay to power. Jellyfin does that same job for nothing and asks no one for permission. A recurring bill for a feature your own GPU already has. #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Real question: what did you self-host for someone else in the house, and do they actually use it? Not what you use. The thing that stuck with a person who does not care how it works. Immich landed here. Jellyfin never did. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

You find out the backup has been failing for three weeks by accident, while looking for something else. One inbox that tells you first instead. Uptime Kuma, Proxmox, and Docker alerting free through a Gmail app password: budgethomelab.com/guides/homelab-email-notifications/ #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Hot take: pointing Watchtower at every container is not maintenance. It is an outage scheduled at a time you did not pick. Update what you actually watch, read the release notes, and leave the rest pinned until you have twenty free minutes. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Tip: Docker publishes ports straight into iptables, underneath UFW. Your firewall says deny and the container is still reachable across the LAN. Bind the port to 127.0.0.1 in the compose file, or the reverse proxy in front of it is decoration. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

The power flickers for two seconds and the box goes down mid-write. That is how a database gets corrupted, not a dramatic all-night outage. Size a UPS by watts instead of VA, and wire the shutdown so it happens without you: budgethomelab.com/articles/best-ups-for-homelab/ #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

🦋 Tip: run df -i, not just df -h. A disk showing 40% free can still refuse writes if something spawned millions of tiny files and ate the inodes. Every space check you run keeps telling you there is nothing wrong. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

🦋 Obsidian Sync is $5 a month to move text files between your own devices. Syncthing does the same job free, with no account, and never sees the files. That is $60 a year renting something the box in your closet already does. #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

🦋 Real question: what did you install, run for a week, and then delete? Not the thing that broke. The one that worked fine and still was not worth the RAM. Mine was a second dashboard I never opened after the day I set it up. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

🦋 Every service in the lab throws a certificate warning and you have trained yourself to click through it. That is a bad habit to keep at home. One reverse proxy, free certs, a real padlock on every subdomain: budgethomelab.com/guides/npm-https-letsencrypt-homelab/ #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

🦋 Hot take: if you cannot explain every line of a compose file you pasted from a tutorial, you do not run that service. You are hosting someone else's guess. Read it once before you bring it up. Plenty of them mount far more of your filesystem than they need. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

🦋 Tip: install chrony on every host in the lab. A clock that drifts a few minutes breaks TOTP logins, fails certificate checks, and scrambles the timestamps you need when you are reading logs to find out what actually went wrong. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

🦋 VLANs sound like a $300 problem until you price a $25 managed switch. Port tagging, a real web UI, and more ports than a homelab will ever fill. The shortlist, plus when PoE or 2.5G is worth the jump: budgethomelab.com/articles/best-budget-managed-switch-vlans-homelab/ #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Tip: set vm.swappiness to 10 on any container host running off an SSD. The default of 60 starts pushing memory to swap long before you are out of RAM, and it shows up as everything feeling slow for no reason you can see in top. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Feedly Pro is about $8 a month to read RSS. FreshRSS is a container, it is free, and it does not decide which posts you are allowed to see. A year of that subscription buys nothing you cannot already run on the box in your closet. #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Real question: what was the last thing in your lab that broke, and how long before you noticed? Not how long to fix it. How long it sat broken. Mine was a DNS record pointing at an IP that had not existed since spring. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Everything you need to rebuild the lab is stored on the lab. That is the gap nobody notices until the disk is gone. What to keep off the box, and the order it all has to come back in: budgethomelab.com/guides/homelab-disaster-recovery/ #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Hot take: "it is only $5 a month" is how you end up at $180 a year across nine services and still call self-hosting the expensive option. Add them all up once. The number is never the one you had in your head. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Tip: add nofail to every network mount in /etc/fstab. If the NAS is down at boot, the host stops in emergency mode and you need a monitor and keyboard to get it back. One word turns that into a missing folder instead. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

A Synology looks like the easy answer until you price the drives and read what that CPU can actually do. DIY costs less and does more, and you own every problem it has. How to pick without guessing: budgethomelab.com/articles/prebuilt-nas-vs-diy-nas-homelab/ #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

What's actually running on your homelab right now, not the wishlist, the real stack. I'll go first: Proxmox, five LXCs, one VM I keep meaning to convert. #selfhosted #homelab #budgethomelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Ran a small mini PC as my entire homelab for two years before I upgraded anything. It handled more than most people assume a $150 box can handle. You don't need the rack to start. #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

A used enterprise SSD with real write endurance costs less than a consumer drive half its size, if you know which listings to trust and which to skip. Most beginners buy new because they don't know what to look for on the used market. #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Listed 18 real services I run and whether each belongs in an LXC or a VM. "Just use Docker for everything" is how people end up with container sprawl they can't reason about. The mistake most beginners make. budgethomelab.com/guides/proxmox-lxc-vs-vm #homelab #budgethomelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

What's the one self-hosted service you'd keep if you had to rip out everything else? Mine's Vaultwarden. Everything else on the rack is convenience. That one's trust. #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Cloud storage subscriptions are a recurring bill for something you could own outright for the price of six months of the subscription. Not everyone should self-host. But if you're already paying monthly for storage you never think about, do the math once. #selfhosted #homelab #selfhosting

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Tried three self-hosted wikis for the homelab docs: BookStack, Outline, Wiki.js. Ripped one out after two days over what it cost in RAM alone. What actually matters for a homelab-sized wiki. budgethomelab.com/articles/bookstack-vs-outline-vs-wikijs #selfhosted #homelab

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

🦋 Tip: set PUID and PGID on every container that touches your media. Match the host user that owns the files. Skip it and the container writes as root, then nothing else on the box can read what it just made. #homelab #selfhosted

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budgethomelab.bsky.social @budgethomelab.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

🦋 Adobe wants about $155 a year for Acrobat so you can merge, split, and OCR a PDF a few times a month. Stirling PDF does those same jobs in a container on hardware you already run. Most people are renting a toolbox they open twice a quarter. #selfhosted #homelab

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