Getting SMART About Your Data: Why Drive Health Isn't Enough.

Since TrueNAS 25.10 stripped the SMART test scheduling and results screens out of the GUI, and 26-BETA still hasn't brought them back, there have been pitchforks and torches on the doorstep of iX Systems, with users demanding iX "give them back their data protection!" iX

Your Self-Hosted Office Suite Is Going Through Some Things Right Now

In case you haven't been keeping up with the riveting world of open source self-hosted collaborative office suites, you may want to sit down. If you use LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, Nextcloud, or Collabora, this may be something you want to read all the way through. No parts of this

LOCKED: The TrueNAS Build System Debate

Note: This post reflects community discussion and iX statements up to Saturday, March 14, 2026 at approximately 8:00 AM EST. Lighting the Fuse Around March 10, 2026, iXsystems deprecated the public truenas/scale-build GitHub repository, moving the TrueNAS build system to internal infrastructure. The initial deprecation notice cited Secure

Homelab Update 2026

Its been awhile since I have covered when I am in my homelab evolution, so I thought for the beginning of 2026 I would update everyone on progress so far. Networking This will be the year I move to a full Unifi stack. I have swapped my router to a

AI isn't so bad...

Yes, AI is everywhere. And not always in a good way. Full disclosure: its not here. This blog is Ghost and nothing here is written, scripted, reviewed, or edited by AI. I also totally understand the ridiculous amount of things which have AI baked in now and have no business

Zero Maintenance Remote Servers

Has the opportunity ever presented itself to you to put a server in a remote location, but you were worried if something happened you wouldn't be close enough to fix it? This post covers the best configuration for a zero maintenance remote server to act as a backup

YouTube Killed My Video Then Refused to Explain Why

I am now another victim of the YouTube algorithm attacking creators. On August 8th, 2025, I uploaded a Top 10 video of new docker apps in July. One of those apps was actually a service called You-tldr made by two brothers from Pakistan. At its core, it can capture the

Dangerous Minds

There is a worrysome growing trend on YouTube pointed at people like me producing content aimed at self-hosting. I have already been on the receiving end of this campaign, and now its getting much more public as YouTube goes after bigger channels. Personally, I have already been a part of

Better Server Monitoring with CoreControl

I have been on a quest for some time now to find simple server monitoring. I feel like this has been a sore spot for the homelab community for awhile because to go-to is the Grafana/Prometheus stack, which I think is so over-complicated and not user friendly at all.

TrueNAS Takes A Leap With Fangtooth

On Tuesday April 15th 2025, iX Systems will release the newest version of TrueNAS (now labeled Community Edition not Scale) 25.04 Fangtooth. Fangtooth should have been a minor upgrade in the lifecycle since 24.10 Electric Eel was a huge deal for finally allowing Docker back onto the bare

Best.VPN.Ever.

Today I want to admit that I was wrong. I have been using and pushing wg-easy as an amazing way to manage a wireguard server for remote access back into your home network. That wasn't the part that was incorrect - wg-easy really is an amazing front end.

YouTube vs Patreon

I have to say I am amazed at the progress of the YouTube channel. I launched back in late October and about 3 months later we have crossed the 1300 subscriber mark! I'm sure for truly successful YouTube channels those numbers are a joke, but my channels caters

We've Moved!

No, neither we nor you have been hacked. We have moved to a new domain: https://blog.serversatho.me! I bought my original hydrology.cc domain when I was new to homelabbing and thought it would be just for me. As the blog and the wiki (https://wiki.serversatho.me)

Farewell to tteck

Unfortunately, a pillar of the Proxmox community has stepped away from his project for health reasons. For anyone who doesn't know tteck or his script repo, his work was the stuff of legend for people running Proxmox. Basically, tteck maintained a set of dozens of scripts to automatically

Selfh.st Survey 2024

For anyone who doesn't know, there are a few great guys out there hosting a site (and now a YouTube channel) for self hosted hobbyists. Their newsletter is amazing and I read it every week to make sure there are no upcoming breaking changes in any of my

TrueNAS Scale Electric Eel: Finally a ToE?

If you didn't get the reference in the heading, Electric Eel is quite possibly the elusive Theory of Everything - a one stop shop which does storage, containerization, and virtualization all in one. But is it all its cracked up to be? What is the Big Deal? For

Servers@Home on YouTube!

Just a quick update for everyone. I love doing documentation for all things servers and now I am branching out into video. Servers@Home (and the wiki) now have an official YouTube channel! I'm starting with videos about TrueNAS Scale Electric Eel since its such a big departure

Sourcing Used Parts

I realize I talk a lot in this blog about getting things used to save money since this is an expensive endeavor at times. I also realize someone new to the space would have no idea how to do that. In this post, I want to give people an idea

Getting Started

Christian Lempa from The Digital Life just released a great video covering many topics from this blog and I wanted readers to be aware of it. In the video, he covers hardware, software, and networking, and his advice is spot-on for new people in the homelab space. If you are

Remote Control

While it is true that many of us spend almost an eternity at our desks, occasionally we do leave the house for short periods of time. During those times, Murphy’s Law can sometimes strike, and we need to make changes to our set-ups. Unfortunately, most home lab software is

Updated Setup

I have posted before about the rack setup I deploy. I have recently made a change to incorporate Proxmox into the rack and want to give you all an update. New Machines, Old Tricks I just did a post on Proxmox and why I am running it instead of Ubuntu

Proxmox

Most people have heard of this type-1 hypervisor, Proxmox. In case you haven’t, its basically a GUI wrapper for Debian which manages containers and VMs. I have always avoided Proxmox because I don’t like VMs (I think they are dated to the point where they are useless in

Who needs 10 gigabit?

at some point in your home lab career, you will see posts of people doing things like fiber in their home, or upgrading their infrastructure to do much faster LAN speeds than whatever comes on their motherboard. it may seem crazy that anyone would need that kind of speed in

Breaking the Rules

I am an unabashedly big fan of Jeff over at Craft Computing. His last video is so good I want to share it here because my summary isn’t going to do it justice. Basically it goes like this: there are a ton of “rules” as what qualifies for a

Small First Server

I just did a post on what I am using now, but I thought it also would be a good idea to talk about what I would use if I had to start from nothing today. it doesnt do a lot of good to make a post on what I