Home Lab Doctrine — Why and How

project: hinata-infrastructuretype: doctrinecreated: 2026-05-22

Core principle: Stop renting your digital life

The home lab exists to decouple critical services from third-party corporate ecosystems. Subscription models bring three structural risks: policy shifts, outage exposure, and privacy erosion. The lab replaces these with local-first, owned infrastructure accessible from anywhere via secure tunnel.

Five domains of utility

1. Local file backups & shares — cloud is the offsite backup only; NAS is primary.

2. Media streaming — Jellyfin primary; self-hosted movies, books, podcasts.

3. DNS & network services — Pi-hole for network-wide ad/tracker blocking. Tailscale for encrypted access.

4. Learning & experimentation — Proxmox / LXC / Docker for isolated environments.

5. Self-reliant infrastructure — mission-critical services remain functional during internet outages.

Hardware tier progression

TierDescriptionWhen to use

1. Free / legacyRepurposed old laptop/desktop.Bootstrap; learning Docker
2. Recycled office PC"Tiny Mini Micro" (Lenovo Tiny, HP Mini, Dell Micro).Primary always-on compute node — current target
3. Purpose-built NASMini-PC (compute) + DAS (storage).Storage exhaustion or transcoding workload exceeds TMM
4. Off-the-shelf NASSynology / QNAP / UGREEN.Skip unless time-poor | | | | | --- | --- | --- | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Operational rules for Jimmy Neutron

• Every new service deployment evaluates against the 5 utility domains. If it doesn't fit one, don't deploy it.

• Standardise on Docker Compose for all new services. Portainer as the management interface.

• Default to Proxmox + LXC for any new service to preserve the "rapid experiment / delete" loop.

• Standardise RAID on RAID 5 / ZFS for redundancy on any multi-drive setup.

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