Elsewhere

Hardware I own, running software I chose.

Servers, networking and self-hosted services — at home, and set up for other people who'd rather stop renting theirs.

The rack got out of hand, and I'm not sorry.

What started as somewhere to keep drone footage turned into a proper homelab: storage, backups, media, a VPN back to the house, and a handful of services that used to be monthly subscriptions and now aren't.

It's the same instinct as everything else here — I'd rather understand the thing than rent it. And it turns out most people want that too, they just don't want to spend the weekends learning Docker.

Add a rack, NAS or network cabinet photo
(landscape, ~1200×900)

What's running

Six things that used to be somebody's subscription.

A streaming service for my own library

Plex serves the media library straight off the NAS to every TV, phone and laptop in the house, and to anywhere else with an internet connection.

Replaces paying to stream a library I already have

Camera recording that stays in the house

Every camera and the video doorbell record continuously through UniFi Protect, with live view and playback on my phone from anywhere. The footage lives on hardware I own, not on someone else's servers.

Replaces a monthly cloud video plan

Network storage

A rack-mount Synology with an expansion unit, roughly 50 TB raw, with the main pool in RAID so a failed drive is a swap and not a loss. Reachable from anywhere, without handing the files to a cloud provider.

Replaces a cloud storage plan, with room to spare

Mac backups

Time Machine backs the Macs up continuously to their own volume on the NAS. A dead drive costs an afternoon's restore, not the files.

Replaces a cloud backup subscription

Uptime monitoring and dashboards

Uptime Kuma checks every service and alerts my phone the moment one stops answering. Grafana, Prometheus and Loki sit behind it for the long view: metrics, logs and trends over time.

Replaces a paid monitoring service

Recipes and meal planning

Mealie. Small, but it makes the point: if a thing is worth a monthly fee, it's usually worth a container.

Replaces a paid recipe app

How it's laid out

Segmented, so one bad device isn't everybody's problem.

Segmented home network layout The internet reaches a gateway firewall, then a managed switch, which splits the network into four isolated VLANs: trusted, IoT, cameras and guest. A Docker host, network storage and a UPS sit on the trusted segment. Wi-Fi access points hang off the switch. Internet Gateway & firewall routing · VPN · camera NVR Managed switch VLAN tagging · PoE Access points SSID per VLAN four tagged segments Trusted desktops · servers · NAS IoT no route to trusted Cameras no internet at all Guest internet only Docker host Pi-hole · Nginx Proxy Manager Uptime Kuma · Mealie Grafana · Prometheus · Loki Watchtower Network storage RAID pool + expansion unit Plex media server Time Machine backups Homebridge Rack UPS clean shutdown on an extended outage
Scroll the diagram sideways to see all of it. Representative layout — the same shape I'd build for someone else. Addressing and hostnames left off on purpose.

Want your own, without the weekends?

Media server, network storage, backups, VPN, or just a home network that stops dropping out. Specified, built, and documented.

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