01 — Hardware
A small server for real responsibilities.
Instead of starting directly with a complex infrastructure, I chose a simple and scalable base that is easy to maintain on a daily basis.
Fig. 01
Homelab / Self-hosting / 2026
Personal project
Homelab
A personal homeserver running on a Dell OptiPlex 3080 Mini PC, designed to host Dockerized services in a simple, secure and maintainable way.
Stack
- Proxmox
- Docker
- Linux
- Jellyfin
- Home Assistant
- Pi-hole
- Tailscale
- Uptime Robot
- UFW
Skills gained
- Setting up and maintaining a personal homeserver
- Running multiple Dockerized services inside a virtual machine
- Configuring a restrictive network policy with UFW
- Limiting local access to sensitive interfaces from a trusted workstation
- Securing remote access with Tailscale instead of exposing services publicly
- Monitoring service availability with Uptime Robot
- Understanding the trade-offs between simplicity, security and maintainability
This homelab is my personal self-hosting environment, running on a Dell OptiPlex 3080 Mini PC. It currently hosts a single virtual machine running several Dockerized services, including Jellyfin, Home Assistant and Pi-hole. The next goal is to isolate a cyberlab in order to freely experiment with blue team and red team tools in a realistic context, such as Metasploitable, Nmap and SIEM tooling.
02 — Services
One VM, several Dockerized services.
For now, I have only deployed fairly basic services that are genuinely useful in my daily life. A single virtual machine hosts Jellyfin for media streaming, Home Assistant to centralize home automation, and Pi-hole for DNS blocking and network filtering. This approach covers concrete use cases without making the whole setup too difficult to maintain.
Fig. 02
03 — Network & remote access
Closed by default.
The network configuration follows a restrictive approach: all incoming traffic is blocked by default. On the local network, access to administration services is limited to my laptop, preventing any random device on the network from reaching sensitive interfaces. For remote access to the Proxmox instance, I rely on Tailscale instead of exposing services directly to the public internet. Uptime Robot completes the setup by monitoring exposed or critical services, with an email and a Discord notification when something goes wrong.
Fig. 03