My homelab journey all the way back when I began attending Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology. The oldest photo I have documenting the start of my homelab journey dates back to October 23, 2025. At the time I remember not knowing what my plan was for the server, just that I was going to create one.

Thus began the onslaught of hardware purchases, long nights awake doing research, and many failed experiments. The photo carousel off to the right, or below for mobile, is a select of photos taken over the course of my homelabbing journey to modern day. 

The operating system I have chosen to work with is Proxmox. Reason for this is because it is a fairly easy install, but mainly due to the level of support it has. There are dozens of websites that offer premade scripts to troubleshoot and install software of your choosing. 

Currently my homelab has a few active services that I use almost daily.  The most important service used by myself and my family is Jellyfin. Jellyfin is aruably one of the best media server options out there that costs nothing to run. To give myself and my family ease of access, by registering for a free URL through DuckDNS, we can access the server on the web without and trouble. Then for quick monitoring, I use Beszel, a free open source server monitoring tool that let's you view selected statistics online. This allows me to check on my server's memory performance and temperature without needing to access the Proxmox UI. I use Cockpit to grant myself online access to a mounted drive ultimately turning that drive into a NAS (Network Attached Storage). Finally, the service that holds this entire project together, Tailscale. Tailscale is a free peer-to-peer VPN that allows you to connect to services that typically are bound to one network from anywhere. By installing and connecting Tailscale to each service (container) that is being ran on my Proxmox server, I am able to access my services from anywhere without being required to be on the same network as the server.

Future goals as of, August 26th, 2026 include a few new services set up for long term usage. Currently on another piece of hardware I have an online book server named Kavita running. Eventually I would like to migrate that setup over to my official Proxmox server. Additionally, I would like to incorporate more QOL services that run light, but offer long term benefits.