Hosting Applications (Homelabbing_2)

In my last blog post I wrote about my first steps in homelabbing, to clarify in homelabbing you try to setup a home server environment to run services, test and learn new stuff. Some examples: Host a cloud service, a picture backup service, a home NAS (Network Attached Storage), your own streaming service or even a Minecraft server. I set up a “home server” an old laptop got it a new operating system and installed the first services.

After this first success, I felt ready to dive deeper. To really host a service, that I can use, maybe even outside of my home network. And the first thing, that came to my mind was a Minecraft server. My cousin had done it, other friends had done it, so it can’t be that hard. And it really isn’t. The documentation is good, all in all it’s just installing java & the basic server run file. I just had one issue, which was exposing a port to the internet, which I could solve after a while of searching through forums. (I ended up finding the answer in the docs, just not where I looked.)

Now, I had used the terminal, I had a service running, why not set up something that I can use in a more productive way? And this one, didn’t go so well. See for a lot of the services most people run on their homelab you need a separate software for them to run properly, most of the time that is Docker. In short, Docker solves the “It works on my machine…” problem, a lot of new software has. (Here is a Network Chuck tutorial explaining Docker in more detail: https://youtu.be/eGz9DS-aIeY?si=aSPVoBCwRwZ6zaLs) It basically creates the perfect environment to run a certain piece of software. And just getting that to work, took me a while, reading documentation, forums, watching video tutorials.

After I had setup Docker and it was running properly, I decided to install a Remote Desktop application, so I could make changes to my home server from where ever I wanted, without having to use the old laptop to do so. I planned to hook it up to my home network and leave it running, without having to open it up to make changes. Through a Reddit post I discovered RustDesk, an open source remote access software, which can be self hosted through Docker. And for the first time, installing a new service just worked. The Docs were easy to follow and in less than an hour, I had RustDesk running.

After this first success I really wanted to have a service running, that would provide a benefit to my day to day life. Three different ones really caught my eye: PiHole, a network wide ad-blocking service, Immich, a Google Photos like picture backup cloud and n8n, a patching tool similar to Max that let’s you create Ai supported automations. (I provided Links to the projects below)

Sadly It was not all fun and games. Like all good homelabbing projects I ran into another problem, which had put this whole experience to a hold. Everything I had done until now ran through the W-Lan of my apartment, which is suboptimal, it clogs up the WiFi for other mobile devices and is slower, compared to a wired connection. Since I planned to put the server somewhere in the apartment and never move it again, I wanted to hook it up immediately. This lead to the laptop not booting, so I couldn’t do anything while it was hooked up to the network, but it would work fine when I unplugged it.

Impact for my Masters Thesis

Thinking back now, when I tried to set up Docker, this actually was my first encounter with a big problem in open source: Bad newcomer onboarding and difficult documentation. As I would find out later, during deepening my research in open source, this is also one of the areas that experts see the most use for UX work, creating an easy to understand onboarding and easy to read documentation. It’s a hit or miss. Sometimes it takes hours to troubleshoot a problem and reading through forum posts, to find the solution, that works for you.

What still stuck with me this whole time, thinking about open source, was the thought of coming into a new area or hobby and trying to solve a problem I don’t truly understand. I have used open source software before, I read docs and learned a lot, still finding a research question or a problem to solve is hard. I guess I need to dive deeper into this whole field to truly understand it. Everything I thought about felt strange, a new person coming in and trying to solve a problem that they read about in some forum or book. This lead me more into the direction of documenting, how to contribute as a designer in the first place or how to run/ start an open source project, since I really like the way of providing a product for others to use and change, best case for free.