Pillar
Storage & Homelab
OSS storage, ZFS, Proxmox, TrueNAS, Unraid, homelab networking, drive selection, backup strategy.
Plex lifetime jumps to $250 and the Jellyfin migration just got a real analytics tool: JellyStat lands
Plex tripled the lifetime price in May 2026 and accelerated a Jellyfin migration that was already underway. JellyStat (the Tautulli-equivalent for Jellyfin) makes the move credible for serious users.
Pi: the minimal coding agent that runs in your terminal and does not try to be Claude Code
Pi is a 100% open-source CLI agent without MCP, sub-agents, or permission pop-ups. It just runs commands. After a week of testing, it is the right tool for homelab + infra-as-code work.
ZFS pool design for a 4-bay homelab: the decisions that actually matter
A practical guide to designing a ZFS pool for a 4-bay homelab in 2026. Mirror vs RAIDZ, drives, ashift, recordsize, special vdevs, and the boring ops that decide if the pool survives.
DGX Spark + Ryzen 395 — homelab AI hardware reached its inflection in April
A user posted a 16x DGX Spark cluster with 2TB unified memory. AMD shipped a 128GB Ryzen 395 mini-PC. Homelab AI hardware moved from "expensive" to "credible" this month.
MinIO archived — the open-source storage shakeout and what to use instead
MinIO archived its main repo on April 25. The selfhosted community has moved on to Garage, SeaweedFS, and RustFS. The license-vs-commercial pattern keeps repeating.
Bitwarden CLI compromise — the supply chain attack pattern hits password tooling
The Bitwarden CLI was compromised on April 23 via the Checkmarx supply-chain incident. The CLI repo had been archived in 2022, which is the actual story here.
NGINX is dead? Angie migration — what the F5 split actually means for your reverse proxy
Christian Lempa's March 27 video walks the NGINX-to-Angie migration. The framing question matters more than the technical one — and the answer is uncomfortable.
Dokploy vs Coolify in February 2026 — and why Docker Swarm came back
Christian Lempa's February 27 head-to-head flagged Dokploy's Swarm support as the real differentiator. Two weeks running both on Hetzner — Coolify still wins single-node, Dokploy unlocks multi-node.
Minisforum MS-R1 review: the world's first ARM mini workstation, three months in
Minisforum MS-R1 shipped Nov 2025 as the first ARM mini workstation with real PCIe Gen4 x8 + dual 10GbE. Three months of reviewer testing — what the $504-$695 box delivers, and what it doesn't.
Coolify: when you want Heroku/Vercel ergonomics without the Heroku/Vercel bill
Christian Lempa shipped a January 28 Coolify tutorial. The product has matured into the right self-hosted PaaS for 2026. Honest write-up after migrating side projects off Vercel.
OPNsense + Prometheus + Grafana: the homelab firewall monitoring stack in 2026
Christian Lempa shipped a January 20 OPNsense monitoring tutorial. The stack (OPNsense + node_exporter + Grafana Alloy) replaces hand-rolled scripts and finally feels finished.
Pangolin: the self-hosted Cloudflare-Tunnel replacement that finally landed in 2026
Pangolin started as a hobbyist project in 2024. By January 2026 it is a credible zero-trust VPN replacement for Cloudflare Tunnel. Honest write-up after migrating my homelab.
NetBox for the homelab: when your IP spreadsheet finally needs a real tool
Christian Lempa shipped a NetBox tutorial in mid-December. The homelab community keeps rediscovering that spreadsheets stop scaling at 30+ services. Honest write-up after migrating.
UGREEN NAS DH4300 Plus review: the ARM NAS bet that almost makes sense
UGREEN keeps shipping NAS hardware with sharp pricing and an ARM chip nobody asked for. The DH4300 Plus is the cleanest expression of that strategy yet. Honest verdict after two weeks.
N8N + AI agents for homelab automation: the patterns that actually work in November 2025
N8N + local LLM + a few well-placed integrations replaced the cron-and-shell-script layer of my homelab. Honest write-up of what works, what does not, and what the YouTube tutorials skip.
Tailscale vs Cloudflare Tunnel for homelab access: the comparison everyone gets wrong
The Reddit fight nobody asks the right question about. Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnel solve different problems — and choosing between them is mostly choosing which problem you actually have.
WD vs Seagate vs Toshiba HDD warranty in 2025 — what you're actually buying
Three vendors, three warranty stories. r/homelab's "Seagate Exos dents" (727 ups) + "How to check HDD genuine" (608 ups) + r/DataHoarder's WD vs Seagate threads frame the real buying decision.
NAS drive buying guide 2025 — when 18TB used enterprise is the right call
HDD prices doubled through 2025. r/homelab "Hard drive prices have doubled" (1121 ups) + "vendor unacceptable shipping" (2272 ups) + Lawrence Systems framing shape the buying calculus.
Building a 3-node Proxmox HA cluster — the homelab high-availability path
A 3-node Proxmox cluster with HA is achievable under $1,500 in 2025. Craft Computing's CEPH tutorial + Lempa's LXC framing + r/homelab dashboard threads = the working build.
OpenZFS 2.3 review — RAIDZ expansion lands, plus the quieter features worth caring about
OpenZFS 2.3 shipped the RAIDZ expansion feature homelabbers waited a decade for. r/zfs threads from June-August 2025 cover the operational reality. Working review from running 2.3 on a homelab pool.
Unraid vs TrueNAS Scale in mid-2025 — where they converge, where they diverge
Both platforms shipped meaningful changes in early 2025. Lawrence Systems' TrueNAS Per-App IPs walkthrough + r/unRAID's ZFS AnyRAID announcement frame the convergence. Working comparison.
Building a quiet homelab server in 2025: the parts list and the silence trade-offs
Quiet homelab is now achievable without spending FAANG-money. The hardware is here, the trade-offs are tractable. Here is the working parts list and the noise-vs-capability math.
Proxmox VE in 2025: the default homelab hypervisor, reviewed honestly
Proxmox VE 8.4 ships in April 2025 and remains the homelab hypervisor everyone defaults to. After running it for years across multiple builds, here is what it gets right and the rough edges.
TrueNAS Scale vs Core in 2025 — which to pick (and whether the question still matters)
iX has signalled Scale is the future. r/truenas 25.04 release thread + Lawrence Systems' Per-App IPs walkthrough + the Synology-exit migration patterns frame the working decision.
Docker Hub pull rate limits — what the April 1 2025 change actually meant for homelabs and CI
Docker announced stricter Hub pull limits effective April 1, 2025. Christian Lempa walked through what breaks, what to migrate to, and how to authenticate. The cleanup was overdue.
The homelab AI server era — Christian Lempa's rig and the early-2025 self-hosted AI rush
Christian Lempa upgraded his Proxmox stack for AI workloads. NetworkChuck wired up Open WebUI + LiteLLM. By March 2025, the "AI in the homelab" pattern had concrete recipes.