The state of homelab tech (2026) (Friends)
Show notes
Techno Tim joins Adam to dive deep into the state of homelab’ing in 2026. Hardware is scarce and expensive due to the AI gold rush, but software has never been better. From unleashing Claude on your UDM Pro to building custom Proxmox CLIs, they explores how AI is transforming what’s possible in the homelab. Tim declares 2026 the “Year of Self-Hosted Software” while Adam reveals his homelab’s secret weapons: DNSHole (a Pi-hole replacement written in Rust) and PXM (a Proxmox automation CLI). Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 8 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time. Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more. Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Featuring: Techno Tim – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: People Techno Tim - Tim Stewart’s website, YouTube channel, and documentation hub Crosstalk Solutions - Chris’s channel, mentioned for building custom Ubiquiti API tools Virtualization & Infrastructure Proxmox VE - Open-source virtualization platform for VMs and containers TrueNAS - Enterprise-grade open-source storage operating system built on ZFS HexOS - Consumer-friendly NAS OS built on TrueNAS (in development) Proxmox VE Helper Scripts - Community-maintained scripts for easy LXC and VM deployment Self-Hosted Software Paperless-NGX - Self-hosted document management system with OCR Paperless-GPT - AI-powered enhancement for Paperless-NGX using LLMs Ollama - Run large language models locally on your own hardware Open WebUI - Self-hosted web interface for interacting with local LLMs Plex - Media server for organizing and streaming your personal media library Home Assistant - Open-source home automation platform Pi-hole - Network-wide ad blocking via DNS filtering Document Intelligence & RAG Dockling - IBM’s open-source document parsing library for AI/RAG pipelines PaddleOCR - Multi-language OCR toolkit for document recognition AI & Agents Claude - Anthropic’s AI assistant, used for homelab automation in this episode OpenCode - Open-source AI coding agent (mentioned as potential homelab tool) Model Context Protocol (MCP) - Protocol for connecting AI models to external tools and data Networking Ubiquiti - Enterprise networking gear popular with homelabbers (UDM Pro, UniFi) Tailscale - Zero-config VPN for secure networking between devices Container & Orchestration Docker - Container platform for packaging and running applications Kubernetes - Container orchestration for managing containerized workloads Fly.io - Platform for running containers close to users globally Monitoring & Observability Grafana - Open-source analytics and visualization platform Prometheus - Open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit Security & Authentication Bitwarden - Open-source password manager (self-hostable) Authelia - Open-source authentication and authorization server Databases MariaDB - Community-developed fork of MySQL Redis - In-memory data store for caching and messaging PostgreSQL - Advanced open-source relational database Hardware Mentioned Intel Optane - Ultra-low latency storage drives (discontinued but prized for ZFS special vdevs) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 - GPU used for Plex transcoding and local AI inference Concepts & Techniques ZFS Special Vdevs - ZFS feature for accelerating metadata and small file operations PCIe Bifurcation - Splitting a PCIe slot to support multiple NVMe drives Medallion Architecture - Bronze/Silver/Gold data lake pattern discussed for document ETL Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
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