A work assignment took me away from my home for a few days, and I thought this would be the best time to put my Homelab through its paces. This was exactly the kind of scenario I had in mind when I started the self-hosting journey last year. So to ensure this was a successful test, I began with some prep work.

Preparation #

I first made a list of all the use cases I needed from my Homelab while I was away.

Entertainment: I needed to be able to consume movies, shows and audiobooks that were stored locally on my server
Photos: I wanted to automatically upload all the photos I took from my phone back to my hard drive back home
Personal Documents: I wanted safe and secure access to my identity and other documents at all times

For each of the use cases, I already setup the following services on my Homelab and I have been using them for the past few months now:

Plex (with a Plex Pass) – A personal Netflix like solution, that manages your movie and series collection
Jellyfin – A backup service for movies and shows in case of any issues with Plex
Audiobookshelf – The best find in my self-hosting journey so far. As the name suggests, its an audiobook server.
Immich – A complete self-hosted photo and video management service, without sacrificing security and privacy
Paperless-ngx – Not exactly a Google Drive replica, but all my important identity documents have been scanned into its database using its feature-rich app. I can access my documents safely and securely wherever I go.

Additional essential services #

Some additional services are also required which run in the background, that allow all of the above apps to be accessed securely from outside the home network. Here’s a few of them:

Cloudfare Domain – Although not strictly necessary, I have my own domain which I use to expose certain services (like this blog) to the public.
NGINX Proxy Manager – For managing the network traffic and ensuring my home network information is not exposed to the internet
Tailscale – The most critical component that creates a private and secure Peer-to-peer network between the Homelab server and the client devices, all using the Wireguard protocol.
Monitoring Dashboard – Essential to keep an eye on server monitoring and performance

Usage #

To start off, I had two personal devices with me during travel, a phone and a laptop. I installed the Tailscale app on both the devices, as I use my laptop to watch movies or sometimes listen to music and my phone to listen to audiobooks. Installing, setting up Tailscale and testing my connectivity to my home network was a breeze. I have been super amazed with how flawless the Tailscale setup is.

By far the app the most used service was Audiobookshelf. My audiobook files are stored on a local storage on the Homelab server and Audiobookshelf makes them available for consumption with a web interface and a native iOS app. The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan is my current favourite audiobook series. All throughout the flight I listened to an offline copy of the books. As soon as I was able to get connected to the internet, my Tailscale setup allowed me to connect to my home network and the audiobook progress was synced back up to the server.

I didn’t use Plex or Jellyfin that much, but I was able to test the streaming quality and it was perfectly fine. The Immich companion app was able to store all my photos and associated metadata like location and sync it back to the Homelab. It was brilliant. Reliance on cloud based services for photos and videos storage and management is the first thing I want to get rid of completely. I was glad to see the app performing well and gives me confidence it will happen soon.

Performance & Reliability #

I have to be honest, not all things went to plan. Great though it was to access my own content from my own server and with absolute ease, my server hardware was not reliable. And that caused some availability issues. The fault, however, is not with the services or the way I have set it up, but with the cheap discarded server hardware I got off eBay. It encountered occasional system hang ups or freezes that could not be rectified from a remote location. However, my on site IT support staff (Shilpa) came to the rescue with a few hard reboots.

Conclusion #

This was an amazing test and I was able to get maximum usage out of my Homelab. I see definite utility in having a self-hosted infrastructure to host your data, your content, in a safe and secure place (your home) and you are in complete control of both the data as well as the services. However, I still need to build in resilience and reliability into my setup so I can have complete peace of mind whenever I am away from home. Hope this inspires others to be curious and start exploring this hobby! Please let me know in the comments if you would like to be rid of the reliance on external cloud based companies managing your data on their terms.

©️ Shantanu Kulkarny, 2025

Webmentions

Loading mentions...

Comments

Loading comments from Mastodon...

Reply or view original thread on Mastodon