Hi, just recently it’s foss had an article about homelabs. Of course I digged in, since there is a small nuc working tirelessly in the corner of my routers closet. So far it just crawls some web pages for me and sends emails accordingly to my filters. So I hoped to find new exciting stuff to let it crunch through. The articles content did not spark my interest though.
Well, I’d like to know what you are using on your homelab. In hope you’ll do something I’d like to follow. Cheers
Thank you all for your recommendations. You are awesome. I really need to go through it one by one.
To make it easier for myself, this is a small summary of all your recommendations. Thanks again.
Virtualization and Infrastructure:
- Proxmox VE - Virtualization platform
- NGINX Proxy Manager - Reverse proxy manager
- Tailscale - Secure network access
- apt cacher NG - Package caching tool
- neko - Virtualized browser for secure browsing
Monitoring and Notification:
- Uptime Kuma - System monitoring tool
- Netdata - Real-time monitoring
- Zabbix - Enterprise monitoring solution
- Ntfy - Notification tool
Media Serving and Management:
- AudioBookShelf - Audio book management
- Jellyfin - Media server
- Syncthing - File synchronization
- Calibre-Web - Ebook management
- Spotweb - Usenet indexing
- Plex - Media player
- Komga - Comics and eBooks
File Sharing and Collaboration:
- Syncthing - File synchronization
- Gitea - Git hosting platform
- Sharry - Secure file sharing
- Vaultwarden - Password manager
- Stash - Data repository
- Baserow - Database management
- wiki.js - Wiki platform
- Wordpress - Content management system
Development and Version Control:
- BOINC - Distributed computing
- Forgejo - Git repository
- Gitea - Git hosting platform
- Development environment LXCs with VS Code
Networking and Communication:
- Traefik - Reverse proxy
- Portainer - Container management
- Matrix (dendrite) server - Chat server
- Navidrome - Music server
- Joplin server - Note-taking server
- RSS-Bridge - RSS feed aggregator
- SearXNG - Metasearch engine
- Dashy - Homepage for services
Miscellaneous:
- ActualBudget - Budget management
- SabNZBd - Usenet downloader
- Traccar - GPS tracking
- Restic server - Backup tool
- dump1090 + fr24feed + pfclient + piaware + rbfeeder + adsbexchange - ADS-B data tools
- Stirling-PDF - PDF management
- Miniflux - RSS feed reader
- Pihole - Network-wide ad blocker
- Huginn - Automation tool
- LimeSurvey - Survey software
- Omada controller - Network management for TP-Link devices
The key component is some cheap DVB-T receiver with an RTL2832U chip and an R820T tuner. These things usually costed around 15€ but went up now as I just found out. Maybe there’s a newer/better combination for cheap now.
Cut the small DVB-T antenna to 69mm length for optimal reception on 1090 MHz. Or build your own.
Then you need dump1090 which is the tool using the receiver and tuning it to 1090 MHz to receive the ADS-B packages and decode them. It’s providing the decoded packages in different formats on different ports (30002 - RAW / 30003 - SBS / 30005 - Beast mode).
And once this is running, you can just sign up to any ADS-B page, get your feeder ID, take their feeder software and point it to the correct port of dump1090. That’s basically it.
I’ve created my own custom minimalistic containers for dump1090, fr24feed, pfclient and piaware, but you can find universal ones on Docker Hub. The services I feed to are:
(Most of these sites give you premium access to their data in return.)
Oh, and if you live near waterways, this totally works for ships, too. It’s just a different frequency (~162 MHz), so you’d need a second DVB-T dongle and different antenna (46.3cm). And the dump1090-equivalent there is called AIS-catcher. With that, you can feed to sites like ShipXplorer, MarineTraffic, etc…
Thanks for the detail instructions. Sounds fun :)