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).
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Featuring:
- Techno Tim – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
- Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
People
Virtualization & Infrastructure
Proxmox VE - Open-source virtualization platform for VMs and containersTrueNAS - Enterprise-grade open-source storage operating system built on ZFSHexOS - Consumer-friendly NAS OS built on TrueNAS (in development)Proxmox VE Helper Scripts - Community-maintained scripts for easy LXC and VM deploymentSelf-Hosted Software
Paperless-NGX - Self-hosted document management system with OCRPaperless-GPT - AI-powered enhancement for Paperless-NGX using LLMsOllama - Run large language models locally on your own hardwareOpen WebUI - Self-hosted web interface for interacting with local LLMsPlex - Media server for organizing and streaming your personal media libraryHome Assistant - Open-source home automation platformPi-hole - Network-wide ad blocking via DNS filteringDocument Intelligence & RAG
Dockling - IBM’s open-source document parsing library for AI/RAG pipelinesPaddleOCR - Multi-language OCR toolkit for document recognitionAI & Agents
Claude - Anthropic’s AI assistant, used for homelab automation in this episodeOpenCode - Open-source AI coding agent (mentioned as potential homelab tool)Model Context Protocol (MCP) - Protocol for connecting AI models to external tools and dataNetworking
Ubiquiti - Enterprise networking gear popular with homelabbers (UDM Pro, UniFi)Tailscale - Zero-config VPN for secure networking between devicesContainer & Orchestration
Docker - Container platform for packaging and running applicationsKubernetes - Container orchestration for managing containerized workloadsFly.io - Platform for running containers close to users globallyMonitoring & Observability
Grafana - Open-source analytics and visualization platformPrometheus - Open-source monitoring and alerting toolkitSecurity & Authentication
Bitwarden - Open-source password manager (self-hostable)Authelia - Open-source authentication and authorization serverDatabases
MariaDB - Community-developed fork of MySQLRedis - In-memory data store for caching and messagingPostgreSQL - Advanced open-source relational databaseHardware 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 inferenceConcepts & Techniques
ZFS Special Vdevs - ZFS feature for accelerating metadata and small file operationsPCIe Bifurcation - Splitting a PCIe slot to support multiple NVMe drivesMedallion Architecture - Bronze/Silver/Gold data lake pattern discussed for document ETLSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
