Homelab

I’ve self hosted an n8n to automate video uploads to youtube. The idea was pretty simple - when I put an mp4 file in a specific dir on my nas, n8n would pick it up, as well as a metadata.json file. The metadata file would contain things like the title and description, and it would upload this to youtube. I started creating this automation and pretty soon had something that resembled the finished workflow. I started testing it out. However, I ran into a problem. I had a Read/Write files from disk node in my workflow, and whenever I manually executed it, it would take way too long to finish - a couple of minutes. My first thought was OK - the video files are pretty large, and we’re likely loading them into memory. Then again, it should not take that long, as the video I was testing with was about 200MB in size. I tried playing around with it a bit more but could not get it to work properly. The spare time I had ran out, so I left it as is to continue with it when I next have time for it. ...

For many years now I’ve had at least one machine at home which would work as a server to host some apps. In the last couple of years I’ve been getting more into it which has led me to purchase additional hardware. I’ve decided it would be nice to document my journey so I’ll try to make a post like this - detailing the setup that I currently have with both the hardware and the software once a year. ...

My homelab consists of 4 machines currently. When choosing them I tried to be energy conscious - using hardware which would not consume too much electrical power, while still trying to maintain the up-front cost low. These are mostly older systems and I was unable to find decent power consumption numbers for them. The specs 1x MSI Cubi 3 Silent NUC CPU Dual-core i5-7200U RAM 2×16GB 2x Lenovo ThinkCentre M910 Tiny ...

I’ve been using Umami analytics on this blog for quite some time now. I self host an instance on my homelab. I spent a bit of time researching self-hosted analytics and generally they had a few issues. First, I’d like the analytics platform to be privacy focused. No cookies, GDPR compliant, no PII. Umami checks this mark. Second, many of the alternatives had quite a bit of hardware resource overhead once hosted. They would either consume a ton of memory, the cpu usage would be high or require me to host something like ClickHouse to run them. Since this blog is not the new york times I feel like hosting a specific database for it would be overkill. My homelab is rather small, so keeping things minimal is how I manage to stretch it. Umami consumes around 1% of a CPU core and ~240MiB of RAM on my homelab. ...