Artificer-Forge Homelab
A fully self-hosted home server rack built from scratch. The goal was a reliable, low-power machine that could run media serving, password management, AI agents, and this website — all on my own hardware, with no dependency on cloud services. Everything from the rack itself to the network config was designed and built by hand.
The server runs a handful of self-hosted services, all managed as systemd units and configured to survive reboots and power outages cleanly.
The server sits on a wired ethernet connection at a static LAN IP. Tailscale handles all private remote access — SSH, Jellyfin for friends, and internal tooling. Public traffic reaches the site through a Cloudflare Tunnel, meaning the home IP is never exposed. UFW locks SSH and Jellyfin to LAN and Tailscale ranges only. Fail2ban watches for SSH brute force attempts.
- +RAID is not a backup — but it is peace of mind during a 15 min power outage mid-sync
- +NUT + UPS saved the array on the first real-world test before setup was even complete
- +Tailscale makes remote access trivially simple without exposing anything publicly
- +Cloudflare Tunnel means zero port forwarding and zero home IP exposure
- +UFW named profiles and plain port rules are tracked separately — delete both