As an IT/Linux enthusiast I've watched plenty of videos about homelabs. I’ve seen what people do at home and have always been trying to find a good excuse to dive into it.

My current homelab (if you can call it that) is made up of a Raspberry Pi 4 (RPi) running PiHole and a Synology NAS running some applications (file syncing, photo management, jellyfin). Clearly nothing spectacular.

The Seed

I don’t really know why, but since recently I’ve been reading and watching videos about to my PiHole setup?

This has always caused me choice paralysis, but I’m going through a complex moment (personally) and I think I must do better.

The Plan

First of all, I need a plan. If I want to achieve something with the little time and focus that I currently have, I need very scoped tasks and focus on incremental value. Thus, maybe the best choice is to defer the original idea (deploying HA) to a later stage.

1. Improve PiHole

The first step will be to deploy unbound in a rootless container and improve the , and some to the mix. I chose traefik because it looks pretty straightforward to configure even with my optional requirements. Could I even use traefik to reroute to the Synology box in some circumstances?

2.1 [Optional] Custom domain name

It would be cool to have a custom domain name and learn how to set it up with traefik plus certbot to update the certificates. But I’ll call this a stretch.

3. Parallel roads

At this point I've got 2 different paths with no specific order:

3.1 Tailscale

Configure tailscale so that I can access the homelab when I'm not at home. Hopefully this shouldn't be too bad?

3.2 Home Assistant

The original idea 😅 built the last. There's quite a lot of documentation about running home assistant via containers. Sadly, it looks like I can’t (or shouldn’t?) run