Home Labs

Summary This is a complete account of standing up Ente — an end-to-end encrypted photo and video backup service — on a home server, exposed to the internet through a Cloudflare Tunnel, with mobile and web clients connecting to it from arbitrary networks. The straightforward part of this project was running docker compose up. The interesting part, and the reason this write-up exists, is a single architectural constraint that determines almost every other decision in the stack: Ente’s storage layer issues AWS SigV4 pre-signed URLs directly to the client, and pre-signed URL validation is byte-for-byte sensitive to header mutation along the request path. Any reverse proxy sitting between the client and the object store is a candidate for silently breaking uploads and downloads — and Cloudflare’s edge, which every hostname routed through a Cloudflare Tunnel passes through, is exactly this kind of proxy. ...

🔐 TLS Certificates for Homelab Using Cloudflare + Cert-Manager + Let’s Encrypt With Traefik operational as the ingress controller in a K3s cluster, the next logical step is to provision HTTPS automatically using Let’s Encrypt certificates, Cloudflare DNS validation, and Cert-Manager. This ensures encrypted traffic across services in a self-hosted homelab. ☁️ Prerequisites A domain managed by Cloudflare An API token with DNS edit permissions Traefik installed and configured as the ingress controller A functional K3s cluster with outbound internet access 🔧 Step 1: Install Cert-Manager Install cert-manager using Helm ...

🚀 Self-Hosting with K3s and Traefik Set up a lightweight Kubernetes cluster using K3s on a Raspberry Pi, deploy Traefik via Helm, and prepare for self-hosted services with ingress routing and local TLS. 🧰 Prerequisites A Linux host with root access (e.g., Raspberry Pi or any ARM64/x86_64 board) kubectl installed on a client machine Helm 3 installed on the cluster (https://helm.sh/docs/intro/install/) ⚙️ Install K3s without Traefik Skip the bundled Traefik and gain full control by managing ingress via Helm ...

What is a Home Server? Let’s start with the basics: what exactly is “the cloud”? It’s just someone else’s computer sitting in a data center somewhere—likely in a different country or even a different continent—managed by your friendly neighborhood cloud vendor (think Google, Amazon, Apple… you get the idea). Now, about servers. The word “server” might sound intimidating, but it’s really just a computer that’s designed and dedicated to doing a specific job. And yes, your smartphone can technically be a server. Heck, if you’re really feeling adventurous, you could even turn your toaster into one (please don’t try this at home, though). ...