We are all used to things more or less working when we go to google or youtube and not having any downtime but in a simple setup like mine where no redundancy is in place things will stop working.

So the question quickly became, how do I monitor if my services are running correctly?

I mean I don't want to open Plex on my TV for my 5year old to watch his favorite movie and the server is down. Any fathers out there with little boys will understand me and the complete lack of patience involved in this scenario.

The solution to my monitoring problem was Uptime Kuma!

For the most part I set up simple pings. If the pinged device or service doesn't answer back let's say for a minute then I get a notification on Telegram!

Setting up the bot in order to get notification on my phone from Telegram was straight forward and almost all inside Uptime Kuma

That means if a device or a service stops responding I instantly get a Telegram message with that info wherever I am as long as I have internet.

Last problem I had to solve was the following:

If my entire server is down that means all services - including Uptime Kuma - are down so I can't get notified.

Fortunately I stumbled upon https://healthchecks.io/

Setting it up in Uptime was pretty easy and free:

The way this works is simple, really. Healthchecks.io expects a ping every minute from my server. If it doesn't get one it waits 5 more minutes for a ping. If that also is not successful it sends an email and also a Telegram notification

This has helped a lot to identify any problems and solve them immediately.

Of course all the services I'm running are not critical in any way but it's a good feeling knowing everything are running as they should without me having to actively check that

Since I had little to no knowledge on how to access my home network and opening ports on my router was a big no-no from a security perspective, googling around I found Tailscale!

Being a complete novice, that was the best solution!
Really easy to install and even easier to configure with apps for every platform (yes, even Windows!) .

Setting it up on my Proxmox server was just as easy thanks to their great documentations explaining installation and how to set up an exit node and advertise routes on Linux so you can access your home network outside of it even if you are behind CG-NAT!

From the client end, just download the app if you're on your phone, log in to your free account and you're connected!

Only big downside was speed when being behind CG-NAT which is the case on my mobile carrier - Vodafone Greece. Also the android app tends to consume a lot of battery even in idle so I turned my Tailscale VPN on only when I wanted to access something on my home network.

Those two drawbacks led me to figure out Wireguard (which Tailscale is also based on)!

I managed to get Wireguard working on Portainer using this template

Things aren't as easy as Tailscale, but even me being an idiot got it running.

1. I had to open the required port for Wireguard - UDP protocol - on my router:

2. Register with a free account on duckdns.org a subdomain:

3. Deploy a docker container in Portainer in order to automatically keep my IP address updated on duckdns.org so I don't have to manually input it every time it changes
   
   

4. Deploy the Wireguard container on Portainer filling the port I opened and as WG_HOST the duckdns subdomained I created

5. Profit! ✌️

And that is pretty much it. From the web UI of the new container I can add clients and generate the necessary QR codes without having to dive deep in the Wireguard protocol.

On the client side of things, I just downloaded the android Wireguard app, scanned the QR code on my screen and got connected!

The 2 major drawbacks of Tailscale now gone. I get my full upload speeds even behind CG-NAT and no more battery drainage on my Pixel.

Although now I rarely use Tailscale I still keep both of my VPNs for redudancy. Each is running in separate machines so if one goes down, I have the other one as a backup for remote access.

I love my Pi-hole instance. From network wide adblocking, to local DNS records is one those very few softwares that I cannot think how things worked before it.

Used to run it on 1st gen RaspberryPi with a 4GB SD card but now is part of my Proxmox server as a container.

My routers DNS settings point to the IP address of my Pi-hole, so every request from my network devices has to go through it.

Adding adlists to it means that every time a device tries to load an ad or a known malicious site it will be blocked. You also get to see in real time your DNS queries, which device is making those queries, % of blocked queries etc.
Everything just works! But, even if the do not work as desired, e.g. my wife kept wondering why clicking on the 1st result on Google didn't work, that is easily solved as you can whitelist certain domains.

Another cool thing you can do with Pi-hole is local DNS records.
Pair that with NGINX and you get custom domains instead of IP addresses!

I have a Shelly Plug to monitor energy on my homelab. Instead of typing the devices IP address - 192.168.2.58 - to access it through my browser I can point that IP address to plug.local on Pi-hole. So, no need to remember IPs to access your services.

But if your service is running on a specific port, there you will need NGINX proxy manager!

Let's say I want to access my Home Assistant which is running in http://192.168.2.61:8123/
I can't point Pi-hole from home.thanos to an IP with a specific port (8123 in this case).
Instead I point it to NGINX IP address - 192.168.2.76 - and from there it gets the port number

The end result is really worth it, as I don't have to remember all my IP addresses or constantly visit my Homarr instance

Just type thanos.local from any device connected to my network and voila!

Internet usage really becomes unusable without Pi-hole.
So much so that I find myself constantly connecting to my wireguard VPN or Tailscale when I'm away from home!

Update 31/1/2025

All of this are pretty much obsolete as I've moved everything to a 2 node proxmox cluster with raspberry pi 4 for quorum.

I've also migrated a lot of services from Docker to LXC containers for easier backups and high availability.

Will update the post as soon as I can with all the infos!

Below is a screenshot of my current services running.
I've left a few of them out since I'm constantly trying new things.

That's the overview of the software side of things.

Now for the hardware side of it

Modem and router are not really interesting and won't get into them a lot.
My modem is the standard issued from my provider, since I have to use it, and the router bridged to it just covers my home needs without a problem.

The 2 mini PCs currently running are:

HP G3 Elitedesk
AMD PRO A6-8500B R5 - 2 core 2 thread CPU with a base clock of 1.6Ghz and a boost of 3Ghz
8GB of DDR4 RAM
256 GB nvme for Proxmox
1 TB SSD as an SMB share

Not a powerhouse. But more than capable running Proxmox VE with multiple containers and a Home Assistant VM without breaking a sweat, all while sipping power at <10W.

ASRock X300 Deskmini
AMD Ryzen 3200G - 4 cores 4 threads with a max boost of 4Ghz
32GB DDR4 RAM

4TB total storage - 1 nvme and 2 SSDs - with a spare nvme slot for future upgrades

I'm pretty happy with the performance and stability (yes, even on Windows) with the system again drawing <15W at idle

Overall a great platform and a great mini pc.

Somewhere around December 2021 I stumbled upon Home Assistant wanting to take control of my smart home devices which were from different companies, all with a different app making things more complicated that it needed to be.

Since Home Assistant runs as an OS, I tried it on my Windows machine through VirtualBox. That was the first rabbit hole.

I also had an old Raspberry Pi Model B, which I had bought in 2012 and not used in a decade or so. I installed DietPi in it and run PiHole for network-wide adblocking and DNS which in turn taught me a lot about networking in general.

Next came Docker, which I had never heard before. Got it running on the same machine with WSL and installed Portainer to manage containers.

Then came Reddit and r/selfhosted. After that Awesome-Selfhosted

Plex, VPN solutions, monitoring etc. all soon followed

Now I get to watch and share my movies with friends and family, listen to my audiobooks and podcasts, block intrusive ads, run my smart home devices locally and other cool stuff like even self hosting this webpage!

As I add more articles documenting the services I'm running I'll update this page also.