Yesterday I made my first trip outside of the house with the intention of accessing files remotely, from my self-hosted cloud service, without a plan B. I needed to print some stuff at my parent’s place. So it seemed like a good low-risk but high-risk exercise, forcing me to put a bit of faith in the setup I’ve been working on for a while. I’m pleased to report that the documents were printed successfully.

The BuzzMoo Cloud is part of a broader IT reform strategy being undertaken here at Headquarters. The motivation isn’t use open-source for open-sources’s sake. I think it’s more of a coming of age story for both me and the software.

The first major overhaul was the move from HomeKit to HomeAssistant. This wasn’t a small task.

The second major shift was bringing Proxmox in as the engine that powers most of what I need to do.

The third was NextCloud. I hadn’t heard of it, or even thought about a self-hosted cloud platform until Microsoft and Apple decided to start increasing their prices. It’s not that I can’t afford it, I just couldn’t work out why I should pay them more for the exact same product.

Here is Product A. You pay B for it, please.

Ok.

Here is Product A. You pay more for it now, please.

Nah.

So, NextCloud it was. And it’s great.

The third was Ubuntu. I’ve been using Linux on and off since the early 2000’s. The last long-term install was Manjaro, my first foray into Arch. I’ve used Gentoo, Debian, Mint, Kali, who knows how many others. But it was Ubuntu that finally did it. And because I’m not 14 anymore, I don’t need KDE Plasma and that meant I finally saw GNOME for what it was – a solid, clean and simple UI. The perennial issue of games compatibility has finally been addressed by the Proton project. So, no dual-boot safety blanket, no compatibility issues, no performance issues. To borrow a phrase, it just works. And that feels weird, to be honest. But in a good way.

The fourth is still a work-in-progress. I got a Protectli vault and whacked OPNSense on it, some TP-Link managed switches, and began to over-engineer my new network to the point where I had to carry out a disaster recovery rollback. My CCNA powers have waned over the years.

The current core elements of the homelab:

  • OPNsense
  • Proxmox
  • Home Assistant
  • NextCloud
  • Crafty Controller
  • Scrypted
  • Pi-Hole
  • WLED
  • NGINX Proxy Manager

I think the current state of affairs of open-source software is worth talking about. The difference from the past appears subtle but is remarkable. We’ve gone from “You can do that for free, with open-source, but you’ll need to….” To “You can do that for free, with open-source.”. There’s probably be a bunch of posts on these bits of tech in the coming months, just a heads up.