Dashy: Homepage for Your Homelab

I was familiar with the CNAME workaround, but it's not practical, since I'd have to manage X different zones, one for each redirection. I thought about abusing DuckDNS or something similar for this, but I figured it wouldn't be fair, so I never did.

At one point I set up an internal Smallstep CA [0], which kinda worked but was pretty fragile, so I abandoned it.

I didn't know about ACME-DNS. It looks interesting, but for the time being tunneling everything through Cloudflared works well enough for my needs.

[0] https://smallstep.com/

Hah, I don't want to remember either. I have 18 services, so it's nice to have a catalog of what I have installed.

Is that any different than me typing 'gite' and it autocompletes to my gitea DNS, or 'jell' and it autocompletes to my jellyfin?

I'm guessing if you are self-hosting these things they are used often enough that they would be in the top of your autocomplete?

This is really cool. So I just exposed an instance of next cloud, but it requires an email verification before being accessible. Super cool.

Is the cloudflared smart enough to route connections locally? Hm, not sure how that would work.

I'm sitting at home, but accessing my nextcloud through the cloud flare. Is there a way to get it to talk to nextcloud locally or is it going through the net?

Yeah, they're not strict terms. I personally think a significant differentiator though is that "homelab" tends to have a bit more emphasis on, well, the lab part. Ie., there is a certain amount of experimentation going on with some regularity. Beta software and firmware or even hardware, bleeding edge stuff, a higher tolerance for breaking things (and maybe leaving them broken for a bit when something else catches one's eye), etc. Some of the stuff attempted might not have any direct work requirement or value. It might be purely for fun and personal learning, and/or it might have some professional relation in terms of testing out new stuff in a initial way and kicking the tires before any kind of initial serious deployment. I mean, again there are certainly no hard and fast rules, but "homelab" settings often place more emphasis on dynamism than pure reliability, such as virtualizing things one normally wouldn't all on a single box. Virtual routing/firewall/edge and NAS are big examples to me that normally have their own dedicated hardware (be it on the metal or virtualized as part of one type of HA strat, but still dedicated).

Whereas selfhosting is hosting, though by oneself. The big difference is the level of dependence, how much one requires the stuff being up to the extent if it isn't that's an immediate blocker on other work. In the same way one would typically expect a commercial host to be more focused on uptime, redundancy and overall lack of surprises, selfhosting tends to be more conservative, throw more hardware at a problem, invest more time and effort in polish and smoothing interaction with the wider world, etc. Basically the stuff you'd expect for something where "if this goes down on Friday my weekend is shot" vs "if this goes down on Friday eh maybe I'll poke at it Sunday night or next week sometime".

Of course, one can also have both of these in the same home/SOHO/barn or whatever, just as businesses with decent IT will have some sort of minimal "lab" at least to do a bit of testing with before even getting to early staging. I myself am primarily on the selfhosting side of the spectrum at this point, but I do have a semi-isolated lab section as well where breaking world won't impact my work (nor result in upset family members!). No one right way to do it.

Edit: also on topic, no I don't have a dashboard :). I've at times considered products like Prometheus/Grafana/Heimdall and I guess now there's another one I could look at here, but I've never really been able to justify it vs other stuff. They're often fairly heavy or seem to have side effects to worry about (including security, I like to keep dashboards and IPMI highly isolated on VLANs or their own independent physical network entirely), and while it could be pretty and satisfying my stuff tends to either be working or it's glaringly obvious something is broken since I depend on it, or if it's an emergency condition it's blaring notifications at my phone anyway. And same as commercial service dashboards, to me it seems like to really be an addition a dashboard would need a fairly independent chain from what it's monitoring. Otherwise if the core goes down the dashboard also drops too. That means more dedicated hardware, even if only something like an RPi.

I could see a dashboard potentially being handy for unified monitoring of stats and softer errors, stuff that isn't an emergency itself but might be indicative of upcoming issues or issues with world (ISP always having problems at a certain time or failing to meet SLA say). But hasn't been truly compelling yet. Though sometimes the screenshots people put up make me quite tempted!

Edit 2: upon a bit more reflection, non-technical stakeholders are a factor as well. Just because something is selfhosted doesn't mean it's for oneself only, on the contrary selfhosters having stuff for friends/family, or a group of neighbors in an apartment/dorm having some shared resources is a common use case. A decent dashboard could serve the purpose of giving others a feel for what's going on. Both in terms of understanding/reporting issues without having to go to the admin(s)(you), but also just plain seeing more of what they heck you're up to. A lot of infra stuff in particular can take a certain investment of time and money but not look like much on the outside. Selling others can be valuable in and of itself, humans overall are visual creatures.

There certainly is a lot of overlap between the two.

Homelab is a slightly older term, and has more of a hardware emphasis and makes me picture people with older enterprise gear (Dell R710s/R720s are perennial favorites among that group), older Cisco networking gear, actual server racks and VMWare based setups.

Selfhosted is a bit more modern, and more software focused. More likely to be someone running a bunch of stuff on kubernetes across a bunch of Pis or an old desktop, with Unifi or Mikrotik networking gear

From my understanding, homelab today is a subset of selfhosting, and means selfhosting where you have physical access to the hardware, so usually hosting at home. While Cloud-Hosting can be also selfhosted, but you usually use someone else hardware for it. And while the origins of each are a bit different, the usage today is in that way. We are long past the era were homelab only means experimentation and personal research at home.

Your assertion that there's nothing wrong with not explaining why a thing exists is not backed by reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4

Of course, it's their choice. But don't conflate that with being the best thing for the project or the visitor. Presumably the site exists to convince people to use it, no?

I'm a third-generation maker and inventor. My job requires that I have an intimate understanding of engineering, prototyping, hardware, software and networking. I literally have two kinds of soldering gun on my desk, alongside an oscilloscope and a signal generator. I can talk you through how traffic is routed around the internet and what happens when you press a key on your keyboard in nauseating detail.

Clearly, it's not as common a term as you believe that it is.