homelab - ITNotes

Dashy and Homer: Centralized HomeLab Dashboards for Service Management

March 23, 2026

Streamline your HomeLab service management with a centralized dashboard. This tutorial reviews Dashy and Homer after 6 months of production use, covering installation, configuration, and monitoring.

HomeLab

Home Assistant: Build Your Own Smart Home on Raspberry Pi or Old Hardware

March 22, 2026

After months of stable production use, I'm sharing my practical guide to building an efficient smart home with Home Assistant. Learn to leverage Raspberry Pi or old hardware for seamless automation and regain control over your home's intelligence.

HomeLab

Supercharge Your Home Network: Building a Powerful Router & Firewall with pfSense/OPNsense

March 22, 2026

Tired of your consumer router's limitations and security gaps? Discover how pfSense or OPNsense can transform your home network into a robust, secure, and highly configurable powerhouse, ideal for any HomeLab enthusiast. This guide covers essential setup, key features, and practical configuration examples.

HomeLab

Centralized Logging for Your HomeLab: Monitor Everything with Grafana Loki

March 19, 2026

Discover how a centralized logging system, specifically Grafana Loki, transformed my HomeLab monitoring from a chaotic hunt to a clear overview. This tutorial guides you through setting up Loki, Promtail, and Grafana using Docker Compose to efficiently collect and analyze logs, enhancing troubleshooting and proactive issue detection with minimal resource overhead.

HomeLab

Jellyfin Media Server: Your Self-Hosted Home Entertainment Hub

March 17, 2026

Ever wanted your own Netflix or Spotify, but with content you control? Jellyfin lets you build a powerful, self-hosted media server for all your movies, music, and TV shows. This guide covers setup, advanced features, and troubleshooting for your HomeLab.

HomeLab

Portainer for HomeLab: Effortless Docker Container Management with a Web UI

March 17, 2026

Managing Docker containers in a HomeLab can be daunting without the right tools. Portainer offers a user-friendly web UI that simplifies deployment, monitoring, and administration of your Docker environment. Discover how this powerful tool can transform your HomeLab experience.

HomeLab

IT Learning Roadmap for Beginners: Your HomeLab Journey Starts Here

March 16, 2026

This comprehensive guide provides a detailed IT learning roadmap for beginners, focusing on practical HomeLab setups. Discover essential skills from networking to automation, with hands-on projects and tips to accelerate your IT journey.

HomeLab

Pi-hole: Set Up Network-Wide Ad Blocking in Your Home Lab

March 16, 2026

Pi-hole is a self-hosted DNS sinkhole that blocks ads and trackers network-wide — covering every device from smart TVs to IoT gadgets without any per-device configuration. This guide walks through deployment options, recommended setup with redundancy, and the full implementation using Docker Compose or a native Raspberry Pi install.

HomeLab

Essential IT Certifications for Your HomeLab: CCNA, AWS SAA, LPIC, CompTIA

March 14, 2026

I've reviewed the impact of key IT certifications like CCNA, AWS SAA, LPIC, and CompTIA on my HomeLab environment over six months. These certifications provided foundational knowledge, practical skills, and structured learning that proved invaluable for building stable, efficient systems. My experience has shown consistent results in production.

HomeLab

Best Free Tools for DevOps & SysAdmin — Online Utilities You Should Bookmark

March 13, 2026

Discover a curated list of free online utilities essential for DevOps and SysAdmin tasks. This article highlights client-side tools for JSON, regex, networking, and more, offering convenience and critical data privacy.