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

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!

2335: No Digital Slavery