About
Tinyrack is a homelab workshop. It publishes hardware and software reviews, runs a community forum, and releases open-source tools for running your own services.
What a homelab is
A homelab is a lab inside your home: a personal setup where you build and operate servers, storage, or network gear. If you have a NAS sitting in a closet, that already counts.
Most people rent these capabilities from a handful of large providers. A homelab lets you run the equivalent yourself, on hardware you own. The list of things worth self-hosting is longer than it first looks:
- Photo and video backup
- Network-wide ad blocking
- Password management
- Notes and documents
- A personal blog
- Community sites
- Game servers
You can start with a retired desktop or laptop, which keeps the cost low and keeps working hardware out of the waste stream.
What gets made here
- Reviews and build notes. Small computers, storage, and the software that runs on them, written after actually living with them.
- The forum. A wiki and a place to ask questions while you are mid-build.
- YouTube. Hardware walkthroughs and builds.
- Open-source tools. Dotweave syncs configuration across machines with git. Proxer puts a private HTTP service behind a public URL you control. Both are MIT licensed, and both came out of problems this homelab ran into first.
The infrastructure behind this site runs on the same tools. Everything is on GitHub, including the site itself.
Why self-hosting
Renting a service is often the reasonable choice, and this site does not pretend otherwise. What self-hosting buys is narrower, and worth naming plainly.
Your data sits on a disk you can unplug. The bill stops growing once the hardware is paid for. You learn the network, the storage, and the failure modes underneath the service, and that knowledge transfers to every other system you touch. Because every tool published here is MIT licensed with the source in the open, leaving is never a negotiation.
Who writes this
I am tinyrack, a developer in Korea and an enthusiast more than a specialist. After work I usually end up back at a computer anyway: maintaining the homelab server that runs this site, testing small machines, trying another Linux distribution, and writing some of it down.
The goal is to make this hobby easier to start, so more homes end up full of servers and cables. If you want to try it, the forum wiki is the place to begin.
Contact
Questions are welcome on the forum, or by email at contact@tinyrack.net.