One big box vs distributed homelab

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

• Techno Tim - Tim Stewart’s website, YouTube channel, and documentation hub
• Crosstalk Solutions - Chris’s channel, mentioned for building custom Ubiquiti API tools

Virtualization & Infrastructure

• Proxmox VE - Open-source virtualization platform for VMs and containers
• TrueNAS - Enterprise-grade open-source storage operating system built on ZFS
• HexOS - Consumer-friendly NAS OS built on TrueNAS (in development)
• Proxmox VE Helper Scripts - Community-maintained scripts for easy LXC and VM deployment

Self-Hosted Software

• Paperless-NGX - Self-hosted document management system with OCR
• Paperless-GPT - AI-powered enhancement for Paperless-NGX using LLMs
• Ollama - Run large language models locally on your own hardware
• Open WebUI - Self-hosted web interface for interacting with local LLMs
• Plex - Media server for organizing and streaming your personal media library
• Home Assistant - Open-source home automation platform
• Pi-hole - Network-wide ad blocking via DNS filtering

Document Intelligence & RAG

• Dockling - IBM’s open-source document parsing library for AI/RAG pipelines
• PaddleOCR - Multi-language OCR toolkit for document recognition

AI & Agents

• Claude - Anthropic’s AI assistant, used for homelab automation in this episode
• OpenCode - Open-source AI coding agent (mentioned as potential homelab tool)
• Model Context Protocol (MCP) - Protocol for connecting AI models to external tools and data

Networking

• Ubiquiti - Enterprise networking gear popular with homelabbers (UDM Pro, UniFi)
• Tailscale - Zero-config VPN for secure networking between devices

Container & Orchestration

• Docker - Container platform for packaging and running applications
• Kubernetes - Container orchestration for managing containerized workloads
• Fly.io - Platform for running containers close to users globally

Monitoring & Observability

• Grafana - Open-source analytics and visualization platform
• Prometheus - Open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit

Security & Authentication

• Bitwarden - Open-source password manager (self-hostable)
• Authelia - Open-source authentication and authorization server

Databases

• MariaDB - Community-developed fork of MySQL
• Redis - In-memory data store for caching and messaging
• PostgreSQL - Advanced open-source relational database

Hardware 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 inference

Concepts & Techniques

• ZFS Special Vdevs - ZFS feature for accelerating metadata and small file operations
• PCIe Bifurcation - Splitting a PCIe slot to support multiple NVMe drives
• Medallion Architecture - Bronze/Silver/Gold data lake pattern discussed for document ETL

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!