The State of My HomeLab in 2025
This post is summarizing the state of my homelab as of the 31st of December 2025. As the year is over, I want to review what I've changed in my homelab this year, and discuss possible ideas for what I could pursue in 2026. It is also intended as a snapshot / overview of how my homelab looks right now.
This year, my homelab has seen quite some changes, though most of them are transparent to any inattentive observer. I've also added some hardware towards the end of the year.
Overall the biggest changes to my setup has probably been the switch to Pangolin instead of direct port forwarding on the router. This allows for better isolation of services instead of just opening ports; and selective sharing of applications that run on the cluster (instead of forwarding all https traffic to the cluster). It also allows me to have high availability by having multiple Newt nodes on the cluster (not implemented yet though).
The most valuable things I'm hosting for myself are:
- Gitlab (with my code and notes)
- Pi-Hole (Adblocking, DNS management)
- Home-Assistant
- Proxmox Mail Gateway / Email
- Synology (especially Synology Drive)
- PiKVM
Hardware
I've added a Minisforum MS-S1 to my K3S cluster, in order to have a strong and power efficient machine with enough RAM to run LLM models. So far this has worked out great, because I'm quite successfully running GPT-OSS-120B on it. See my blog post for more details .
Other than that, my setup hasn't changed much. A Synology for storage, one server for Gitlab, and a few servers / old laptops / raspberry pi's for my k3s cluster. I try to host as much as possible on my k3s cluster, although a few services are also running on the synology via the container manager. Gitlab is separate from k3s, because I'm using flux gitops to manage the cluster, so running gitlab on the cluster would be a chicken-and-egg situation.
I do have a few other services running on dedicated devices: A pi-hole on a raspberry pi, a Mikrotik router, a few PiKVM and JetKVM devices for controlling my servers / computers, and a Home Assistant Yellow for running Home Assistant come to mind.
Cloud
Even though I mostly rely on self-hosting as much as possible in my homelab, I've also started to rely more on the cloud.
- Namely: I've switched all my domains to Infomaniak as a provider.
- I'm also using Infomaniak as Cloud Backup provider.
- And I've setup some VPS Lite instances for
- Sending / receiving E-Mail via Proxmox Email Gateway
- Pangolin (Ingress)
- Uptime measurement from outside my network (uptime-kuma)
Overall I'm quite happy with Infomaniak. They offer most of the services that are available in the big clouds for reasonable prices and with a sustainable mindset. They're also a company bound to the Swiss legal framework instead of the US one (which means data is not automatically transferred to the US). The most important feature for me is the plugin they offer for cert-manager so that I can automatically generate https certificates via DNS challenge (on kubernetes, pangolin, but also on all my other separate computers). Only if you have specialized needs, such as running H100's you'll still need to use other clouds.
Hosted Software
| URL | Software | Host | Blogpost / Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| pangolin.akehir.com | Pangolin | Cloud | Using Pangolin to control ingress into my homelab. Blogpost here |
| Newt | Newt | Cloud / k3s / Desktop | see above |
| chat.akehir.com llm.akehir.com chapi.akehir.com |
llama-swap llama.cpp OpenWebUI |
k3s / Desktop | Hosting an OpenAPI Compatible LLM API in my homelab. Various blogposts exist: - On the Kubernetes Cluster - With Docker Compose |
| code.akehir.com | code-server | k3s | A full IDE in the browser is super cool! Gitlab also offers the same, but here it's separate from any Gitlab project and more like a scratchpad. |
| kiwix.akehir.com | kiwix | k3s | Hosting a full copy of Stackoverflow and Wikipedia, how cool is that? Don't ask why, it's just because I can! |
| json.akehir.com | jsonplaceholder | k3s | It's great to have a fake JSON API for quick frontend mockups. I didn't feel like relying on a 3rd party cloud infrastructure for this, so I'm self-hosting the API. |
| uptime-kuma-2.akehir.com uptime-kuma-1.akehir.com |
uptime-kuma | k3s, Cloud | Two instances of uptime-kuma, to measure the uptime of my services from outside my network, and from inside my network (especially for services not publicly accessible). |
| emox-1.akehir.com | Proxmox Mail Gateway | Cloud | For sending and receiving Emails. It is a huge pain to Self-Host email, but on the other hand it's probably the most critical infrastructure - with it you can access / reset your accounts, collect metadata about the users, read private messages. Overall, the privacy tradeoff is worth self-hosting the email (at least receiving email). For sending the Emails, I think I should switch to a specialized provider (like mxroute), because the sent Emails ending up in spam is a definite problem. |
| Synology DSM / Synology Drive / Synology Container Manager | Synology | Instead of relying on OneDrive / Dropbox / Google Drive, I use Synology to host my own drive. Apart from that, I mostly use the Synology as a storage backend for my services hosted on the k3s cluster. |
|
| pdf.akehir.com | Stirling PDF | k3s | A suite of PDF tools. Very practical for quick adaptations to pdfs directly in the browser. |
| chef.akehir.com | CyberChef | k3s | Useful tools for data manipulation. |
| jsontools.akehir.com | JSON Tool | k3s | Small tool for formatting and parsing JSON data. |
| ittools.akehir.com | IT Tools | k3s | Useful collection of IT tools. |
| omnitools.akehir.com | Omni Tools | k3s | Collection of various practical tools for using directly in the browser. |
| restic-rest-server | Restic Rest Server | Synology (Docker) | Useful to store restic backups on my synology. |
| pic.akehir.com | Stable Diffusion WebUI Forge | Desktop (Docker) | Generating and editing images via stable diffusion models. Blogpost here |
| ntdt-arx-7.akehir.com | netdata | arx-7 | Seeing the resource usage of my computer. |
| arx.akehir.com warx.akehir.com |
PiKVM | Dedicated Hardware (PiKVM) | Remote controlling some computers / servers. |
| jet-kvm-1.akehir.com jet-kvm-2.akehir.com |
JetKVM | Dedicated Hardware | Remote controlling some computers / servers. |
| home.akehir.com | Home Assistant | Dedicated Hardware (Home Assistant Yellow) | Home Automation. |
| dash.akehir.com | homepage | k3s | Dashboard / overview over my homeab. |
| portainer-arx-7.akehir.com | Portainer | Dedicated Computer | For the evaluation of container management. |
| komodo-arx-7 | Komodo | Dedicated Computer | For the evaluation of container management. |
| dockge-arx-7.akehir.com | Dockge | Dedicated Computer | For the evaluation of container management. |
| dns.akehir.com | PiHole | Dedicated Hardware (Raspberry PI) | Blocking Ads, Tracking, Virus Protection, managing my internal DNS (so I don't access my resources remotely when I'm at home / using the VPN). |
| minio.akehir.com minio-ake.akehir.com |
MinIO | k3s, Synology (Docker) | As S3 compatible storage backend. I will need to migrate away from MinIO due to their recent decisions though (removing Management Functionality from the Open Source UI, and stopping to produce Docker containers). |
| grafana.akehir.com | Grafana | k3s | Grafana for visualisation and tracking of data. |
| git.akehir.com | Gitlab | Dedicated Hardware | Gitlab as artifactory / asset registry / code storage / source control / docker registry / continuous integration / continuous delivery platform. |
| mk3s.akehir.com | Octoprint | Dedicated Hardware (Raspberry PI) | Remote control of my 3D printer. |
| cert-manager |
cert-manager | k3s | Getting https certificates on the kubernetes cluster. |
| infomaniak-webhook | cert-manager-webhook-infomaniak | k3s | Plugin for DNS validation with cert-manager and infomaniak |
| gitlab-runner | Gitlab Runner | k3s / dedicated hardware | CI/CD. |
| velero | Velero | k3s | Kubernetes cluster backup. |
| openebs | OpenEBS | k3s | Simple kubernetes storage. |
I also deprecated / uninstalled a few applications
- splunk: I had Issues upgrading database, so I deleted the whole instance for now.
- elk: I ended up with 1TB of indexes. That was too much storage for me, so I deleted the whole thing. Maybe I can move the indexes / PVCs to the synology and deal with it.
Sites
In addition to the above, I host a few websites on my k3s cluster:
- https://akehir.com/index
- https://zethno.ch/
- https://travelforchange.ch/home
- https://font-awesome-icons.akehir.com/
- https://bootstrap-icons.akehir.com/
- https://rpg-awesome-icons.akehir.com/
- https://shader.akehir.com/
- https://password.akehir.com/
- https://fluid-simulation.akehir.com/
- https://noto-emoji.akehir.com/
- https://alpha.siteloop.ai/onboarding
- https://app.siteloop.ai/onboarding
Outlook 2026
The first days of 2026 have proven that my strategy is correct, and that I have to increase my efforts: My main goal is to further reduce dependence on any US based companies. Currently I don't think I'll need many new tools for this, it's mainly about migrating the data. Of course that may change once I'm in the trenches.
Maybe I'll re-enable ELK / Splunk. I'll need a way to manage the storage usage though.
I probably need to replace MinIO, maybe with garage..
I definitely want to install paperless-ngx, and of course, there are a number of applications I want to try hosting to evaluate them.