Various methods for exposing self hosted applications to the internet securely when you have things like cgnat, your isp blocking ports or anything that prevents you from port forwarding.

Recently I picked up a $100 Lenovo ThinkCentre M710Q off ebay with an i5 7400T, 8GB of ram and a 256GB NVMe SSD to add to my Proxmox cluster.

The good & Bad

Mini PCs are built to be small, quiet and power efficient, perfect for a home server. They’re also tiny, hence the name meaning they can live pretty much anywhere.

However, their form factor makes them hard to upgrade for future expandability and hard to add redundant storage to.

This post is made for debian based linux distros.

Don’t expose ssh, use a VPN

This is obviously not viable for stuff running in the cloud but for a homelab server its advised to not expose ssh or management ports, if you need external access use a free VPN service like Tailscale or self-hosted Wireguard.

Non-root account for logins / Disable root login

Disabling the ability to login as root helps with many automated bots that brute-force ssh into your server, start by making a new user with any username you want

This is a very old post, I now have a fully functional homelab here - and a full walkthrough of everything on it here.

Im planning to start a homelab this year so I can get real hands on experience with server hardware and software, and also own my information and data instead of having to trust hosting companies with it

Upsides to running one

Most programmers and developers have a homelab for a few reasons

It’s a common misconception that if someone gets your IP address they can find your real home address, get your exact location, hack all your passwords, etc. None of this is true and the only real threat is something like a DDoS attack (Not the same as being doxxed). They can usually also see your general location like City or Neighborhood depending on where you are, you can see what your IP says about you on a site like this if you’re worried about it.