Both Tailscale Funnel and Cloudflare Tunnels solve the same problem — getting public traffic to a service behind NAT without forwarding a port — but they make opposite architectural bets. A deep dive on the data planes, who terminates your TLS, the identity models, the real limits, and which one to actually reach for.
Self-Hosted
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Tailscale Funnel vs Cloudflare Tunnels: Two Ways to Expose a Service Through NAT -
Automating Your Life with n8n and AI n8n as a self-hosted automation backbone for personal workflows — AI nodes for classification and extraction, email triage, RSS briefings, GitHub notification filtering, Home Assistant integration, and building a personal AI assistant with persistent context.
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Local LLMs with Ollama Running large language models locally with Ollama — VRAM requirements by tier, quantization formats explained, model selection for different use cases, Open WebUI setup, modelfiles for custom system prompts, and an honest comparison of when local beats cloud and when it doesn't.
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Cloudflare Tunnels for Secure Homelab Exposure How Cloudflare Tunnels work, setting up cloudflared for zero-port-forward homelab access, Cloudflare Access for authentication, configuration via YAML and the dashboard, and an honest look at the privacy tradeoffs and free tier limits.
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Caddy as a Homelab Reverse Proxy Using Caddy as a homelab reverse proxy: Caddyfile and JSON configuration, automatic HTTPS with Let's Encrypt and ZeroSSL, DNS-01 challenge for internal services, health checks, rate limiting, static file serving, and an honest comparison with Nginx and Traefik.
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Forgejo and Gitea: Self-Hosted Git Deploying Forgejo or Gitea as a self-hosted Git platform: SSH and HTTPS access, Forgejo Actions for CI/CD with runners, migrating repositories from GitHub, webhooks, organization and team permissions, the built-in container registry, and backup and restore.
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Immich: Self-Hosted Google Photos Deploying and running Immich as a self-hosted photo and video library: Docker Compose setup, PostgreSQL with pgvecto.rs, machine learning face recognition and CLIP semantic search, hardware transcoding, external library mounting, and a solid backup strategy.
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Building a Local RAG Pipeline: From Documents to Answers A practical guide to building a fully local Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipeline: document ingestion, chunking strategies, embedding model selection, vector store options (ChromaDB, Qdrant, FAISS), reranking, and wiring it all together with LangChain and Ollama — no cloud APIs required.
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Proxmox VE: The Comprehensive Guide A complete guide to Proxmox Virtual Environment: installation and post-setup hardening, KVM virtual machines with cloud-init, LXC containers, ZFS and Ceph storage, bridged and VLAN networking, clustering with Corosync, high availability, GPU passthrough, Proxmox Backup Server, and automation via the REST API and Terraform.
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ZFS for the Homelab: Storage That Doesn't Lie A practical guide to ZFS on Linux: pool layout decisions (RAIDZ vs mirrors), dataset properties, snapshot strategies, send/receive replication for offsite backup, scrub scheduling, and ARC tuning for systems where RAM is not unlimited.
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Tailscale and the Zero-Trust Home Network How Tailscale works under the hood — WireGuard, NAT traversal, DERP relays, the coordination server — and a practical guide to subnet routing, exit nodes, Funnel, ACLs, and self-hosting with Headscale.
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Hermes Agent: Setup, Local Models, and How It Compares to OpenClaw Hermes Agent from Nous Research has quietly become the fastest-growing open-source agent framework of 2026. This is a hands-on setup guide — including Ollama configuration for fully local operation — a head-to-head comparison with OpenClaw, and a tour of the other agentic frameworks worth watching.
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Wazuh HIDS: Self-Hosted Alternative to CrowdStrike and Falcon Wazuh as a serious self-hosted alternative to commercial EDR — host-based intrusion detection, file integrity monitoring, log analysis, and SIEM features — and how it stacks up against CrowdStrike and Falcon for fleets that can't pay per endpoint.
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Tailscale: The WireGuard Mesh VPN That Actually Works Everywhere A deep technical guide to Tailscale: how the mesh VPN works under the hood, complete setup for every platform, subnet routing and exit nodes for homelab access, ACL policy files, MagicDNS, Tailscale Funnel and Serve, self-hosting the control plane with Headscale, and an honest comparison with WireGuard, ZeroTier, and Netbird.
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Authentik: A Self-Hosted Identity Provider for Everything Deploy Authentik as your self-hosted SSO identity provider — wire up OIDC and SAML for every app in your homelab, run an LDAP outpost for legacy services, replace Google login with something you control.
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DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS: Encrypting the Internet's Phone Book A deep dive into DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT): why plain DNS is a privacy and security problem, how encrypted DNS protocols work, deploying your own resolver, and configuring clients.
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Jellyfin vs Plex vs Emby: The Self-Hosted Media Server Showdown A deep, honest comparison of Jellyfin, Plex, and Emby: feature sets, hardware transcoding setup for Intel/NVIDIA/AMD, client ecosystems, metadata management, and a clear recommendation for each use case.
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Monitoring Your Homelab with Prometheus and Grafana: The Complete Stack Build a production-grade homelab monitoring stack from scratch: Prometheus with Node Exporter and cAdvisor, Grafana dashboards, alerting with Alertmanager, and long-term storage with VictoriaMetrics.
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Nextcloud: Your Own Google Drive (That You Actually Control) A complete guide to deploying Nextcloud: Docker Compose setup, performance tuning with Redis and APCu, external storage backends, Nextcloud Office for collaborative editing, mobile sync, and maintaining a fast, reliable installation.
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Paperless-ngx: Building a Document Management System That Actually Works A deep dive into Paperless-ngx: deploying it with Docker Compose, building an automated scanning pipeline, mastering tags and correspondents, and integrating with your homelab storage.
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Self-Hosted GitHub Actions Runners: Ephemeral, Scalable, and Cost-Effective CI A deep dive into self-hosted GitHub Actions runners: deploying ephemeral runners on Kubernetes with Actions Runner Controller, build caching strategies, security hardening, and a real cost comparison against GitHub-hosted runners.