Proxmox was my first try. Lasted about an hour before I realized it doesnt work with wifi. Wifi was all I had back then, shared apartment no ethernet in my room. So Ubuntu Server 24.04 it is. First thing I did was install Docker and went absolutely ham. Portainer, Vaultwarden, Nginx Proxy Manager, Glance, Beszel, Immich, Ente, Affine, Umami. I even tried Gitlab until my poor little N5095 started begging for mercy. Swapped it for Gitea. I threw databases at it too, Postgres, MariaDB, MongoDB, Redis. Tried Supabase for a bit, went back to plain Postgres.

Jellyfin was a whole education on its own. Encoding, transcoding, audio codecs, bitrate, HDR, container formats. I went in thinking a video is just a video and came out knowing way too much about why some files work on one device and not another. Useful rabbit hole.

Half of these are just weekend experiments anyway. Spin something up, play with it, either keep it or yeet it. Karakeep was one of those, tried it for managing my bookmarks since I have way too many. Some of these experiments stick around, some dont. Thats the fun part. AdGuard took me a whole year to finally set up though. Kept telling myself the cloud version is free, whats the point. But running my own DNS taught me more than the cloud version ever did. It hides everything from you.

Since everything is on local domains I needed a way in from outside. Twingate does the job with one container, connects from my phone. Kind of like Tailscale. Works fine. Lately Ive been hunting for a cheap VPS to set up Pangolin proxy, get some services actually reachable with proper security. I also built a stupid little Docker container that watches my local IP. It changes randomly because I dont control the router here, so it updates a Cloudflare domain whenever the IP shifts. DIY dynamic DNS for my local network. Janky but works.

Most things didnt go smooth at first. Still love tinkering with it though. Read selfh.st, browse the selfhosted subs, keep finding new stuff to break and fix. Worth every penny and every late night.

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