November 4th, 2026 × #homelab#selfhosting#networking#homeautomation
What’s in Our Home Lab
Scott and CJ crack open their server racks to show off firewalls, NAS setups, Proxmox VMs, Tailscale, Home Assistant and self hosted AI coding tools. Come for the 48 core Dell workstation, stay for the offline copy of Wikipedia.
stolinski Host
w3cj Host
#1053
Scott and CJ tour their homelabs, from a fully 3D printed server rack to a custom OPNsense firewall load balancing two ISPs. They dig into Proxmox, Tailscale, Caddy, Synology vs. DIY ZFS storage, Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Immich, Kiwix, and coding over the network with T3 Code and OpenCode.
Show Notes
- 00:00 Welcome to Syntax!
- 00:56 What's in Our Homelabs? Servers, Pis and Workhorse Machines
- 03:54 Proxmox Explained: A Hypervisor OS for Your Home Lab
- 05:49 Scott's Fully 3D Printed Server Rack and Mac Studio
- 11:19 Keeping It Quiet: Server Fans and Noisy NAS Drives
- 12:58 Networking: Building a Custom OPNsense Firewall
- 15:08 Load Balancing Two ISPs With SFP+ Fiber
- 20:07 Wi-Fi Access Points and VLAN Network Segmentation
- 21:40 Scott's Switch and Eero Wi-Fi 7 Mesh Setup
- 25:55 Ditching the ISP Router: PPPoE and Bridge Mode
- 27:51 Accessing Your Services Remotely With Tailscale
- 31:08 Local Domains and TLS Certificates With Caddy and Cloudflare
- 34:37 NAS and Storage: Synology vs. a DIY Setup
- 38:59 Hot and Cold Storage: Hardware RAID, ZFS and Cockpit
- 45:20 Container Management With OrbStack, Proxmox and Portainer
- 47:52 Termix: SSH Into Your Servers From the Browser
- 48:50 Home Automation With Home Assistant and Apollo Automation
- 51:02 Flashing Wyze Cams With Thingino for Frigate
- 52:30 Cloud-Free Smart Devices: ESPHome, Tasmota and Bluetooth Proxies
- 57:07 Self-Hosted Media: Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf and Immich
- 01:02:37 RSS, Read Later and YouTube Archiving With Tube Archivist
- 01:04:01 Offline Internet: Wikipedia and Stack Overflow With Kiwix
- 01:05:46 Paperless-ngx for Device Manuals and Documents
- 01:07:44 AI Coding Agents: Scott's Pi Durable Personal Agent
- 01:09:46 Coding Over the Network With T3 Code and Zed Remote
- 01:15:39 CJ's OpenCode, Open WebUI and code-server Setup
- 01:20:02 What's in Your Homelab? Roast Our Setups
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