A hobbyist who dreams of an off‑grid bunker channels that ambition into a modest homelab. He started with an OrangePI 5, a low‑cost Raspberry Pi alternative, but power‑management quirks pushed him to upgrade to a GMKTec NUC equipped with 32 GB RAM and a 1 TB NVMe drive. The new box runs Debian bare‑metal without a hypervisor.

All workloads live in Docker containers behind a Traefik reverse proxy, while Authentik handles SSO. Connectivity relies on a free Cloudflare Tunnel, which creates an outbound‑only link so no inbound ports are opened. A rented Hetzner VM hosts critical services that need 24/7 uptime, and Syncthing mirrors essential data across the setup.

The stack follows Infrastructure‑as‑Code: Ansible roles define each service, from PostgreSQL and Redis to media apps like Radarr and Jellyfin. YAML‑based playbooks provision networks, volumes, and authentication blueprints, then launch containers with the correct environment. Though the author shuns hypervisors and complex orchestration, the configuration remains reproducible and easy to tear down when experiments end.

Storage remains elementary: a single NVMe disk without RAID, supplemented by Syncthing for redundancy. The author eyes Ugreen or Ubiquiti NAS solutions once a permanent home is secured, but currently prefers the hands‑on tinkering experience. This pragmatic approach keeps costs low while still delivering a functional, self‑hosted environment for development and media consumption.