A hands-on tech blog by a developer who builds, breaks, and documents real self-hosted infrastructure — so you don’t have to figure it all out from scratch.
Every post is written the way I wish I’d found it: exact configs, honest troubleshooting notes, and clear explanations of why things are set up this way — not just how.
What you’ll find here:
🖥️ Self-Hosted Services — Deploying and securing Bitwarden, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, qBittorrent, and more in Docker containers on home servers.
🔧 Proxmox & Storage — Installing Proxmox VE, ZFS pools, LXC containers, backups, WireGuard VPN, and SMART monitoring with Scrutiny.
🏠 Home Assistant & ESPHome — Dashboards, automations, LVGL touch displays, CrowdSec security, Zigbee devices, and custom integrations.
⚡ Hardware & DIY — ESP32 projects, TDS/flow sensors, OpenWrt routers, 3D printing, and real-world wiring experiments.
📡 Networking & Security — Nginx Proxy Manager, Cloudflare, reverse proxies, SSL, VPN access, and intrusion detection
Stashboard V8.0 and V8.2 add a Proxmox clone snapshot web UI for LXC containers and QEMU VMs: real task polling, linked vs full clones, vmstate for running VMs, double-gated and fully audited.
Picking the best ESP32 dev board is a different problem from picking the chip. A full rundown of who makes what – Espressif, Seeed, Unexpected Maker, Adafruit, SparkFun, LilyGO, M5Stack, Heltec, Waveshare, Sunton, Guition, Olimex and the rest – plus the right board for prototyping, battery builds, screens, LoRa, Matter, voice, cameras, Ethernet and video.
I'm VahaC — I build and document homelab setups, self-hosted services, Docker stacks and small AI tools. Expect practical notes, working configs, and no fluff.
