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Playground

Initially this home lab was only meant to practice with Wazuh and other security tools as I was doing TryHackMe. I began digging deeper in self-hosting thanks to r/homelab and r/selfhosted. There are three goals for this homelab: to explore services and technologies, reduce expenses by hosting open source alternatives, and lastly to make data private by having my own infrastructure.

What I've done

Currently I have two machines working together, a local pc and an oracle VPS.

  • local pc holds media services and security tools for ease of access and due to VPS limits such as storage and data consumption.
  • oracle vps is made to run services that are lightweight and requires continuous uptime.

Key implementations

  • Secure Mesh VPN: Linked local and cloud nodes using Tailscale for private, encrypted remote access across all devices.
  • Internal Routing & Reverse Proxy: Configured Caddy alongside internal DNS to manage custom local domain URLs within the tailnet.
  • Automated TLS Management: Utilized Caddy with the DNS-01 ACME challenge for automatic, valid SSL/TLS certificates without exposing internal endpoints directly to the public internet.

What's next for my setup?

  • Dedicated hardware: Transition off my main machine to a standalone server for availability without sharing host resources.
  • Data heavy hosting: Deploy storage-intensive applications like Immich locally to keep personal media out of proprietary cloud ecosystems.
  • Continuous Tool Expansion: Actively test and integrate useful open-source tools that solve practical workflow needs.