Homelab Infrastructure

• Main host: Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS on repurposed gaming PC hardware including a Ryzen 7 3700X, GTX 1060, Gigabyte motherboard, Fractal Design Focus G ATX Mid Tower case, reused PSU, reused 250 GB SSD, and reused 1 TB internal drive.
• Memory was upgraded early from an undersized starting point to 32 GB once container load made the original configuration too restrictive.
• The GTX 1060 is still useful in this build for both Jellyfin transcoding and local AI experimentation.
• The physical setup is a compact basement shelf deployment for always-on infrastructure.
• The Mac mini edge node runs macOS 26.3.1 and stays online for lower-power, high-availability daily services such as AdGuard Home and SearXNG.
• The VPS runs Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS and handles the remote access layer plus public-facing website workloads.

Storage Design

• Media storage lives in a TerraMaster 4-bay DAS populated with WD Red Plus drives: two 10 TB drives, one 6 TB drive, and one 4 TB drive.
• The pool is combined with mergerfs and protected with SnapRAID parity, which gives the setup flexible media growth with recoverability.
• One 10 TB drive is dedicated to media, one 10 TB drive is reserved for parity, the 4 TB drive adds media capacity, and the 6 TB drive holds about 1.5 TB of backups with the remainder used for media.
• A repurposed internal 250 GB SSD handles the OS and Docker volumes, while a repurposed internal 1 TB drive stores network-storage backups and Immich photos.
• The primary homelab server currently stores about 5.8 TB of data, most of it media, with Immich representing a much smaller portion of the footprint.

• Most publicly reachable services flow through `amirb.dev` or service subdomains into a VPS-hosted Pangolin layer, then through authenticated tunnel-based access to the homelab or Mac mini.
• The design keeps home-network ports closed. Public access is handled through tunnel-only exposure rather than direct inbound access to the home network.
• Most services sit behind Pangolin authentication. Jellyfin and Immich use their own built-in application authentication for app access, while Home Assistant is intentionally LAN-only and available through home LAN or OpenVPN.
• Everything is deployed with Docker Compose. Coolify handles Git-based deployment for the portfolio and testing site, using branch-based workflows similar to Vercel.
• Docker was the right fit here because of the ecosystem around self-hosting, strong community support, and the operational simplicity of containerized services.