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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2025

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  • Desec.io is a solid option - it allows for various types of records like TLSA and SRV. It can also generate scoped API tokens e.g. for “only TXT records of the _acme-challenge subdomain of example.com” to use in automated cert renewals, so pretty good for granularity. It’s also a nonprofit.

    I think selfhosting DNS is beneficial when you wanna control your own DNSSEC keys, but you’d need to account for high availability and safety. With that, you could do what’s called a “hidden primary + public secondary” setup to protect your master DNS data from the public prying. You can even use 3rd-party services like ns-global.zone as your secondaries for redundancy and to reduce load on your infra, too. I recommend Technitium and their guidance if you wanna get started




  • I write homelab docs mostly for user guidance like onboarding, login, and service-specific stuff. This helps me better design for people by putting myself in their shoes, and should act as a reference document for any member to come back to.

    Previously I built an Mkdocs-Material website with a nice subdomain for it, but since the project went on maintenance mode, I’m gonna migrate all docs back to a Forgejo wiki since it’s just Markdown anyways. I also run an issue tracker there, to manage the homelab’s roadmaps and features since it’s still evolving.

    I find this approach benefiting compared to just documenting code. I’m not an IaC person yet, but I hope when I am, the playbooks should describe themselves for the nitty-gritty stuff anyways. I do write some infra notes for myself and perhaps to onboard maintainers, but most homelab developments happen in the issue tracker itself. The rest I try to keep it simple enough for an individual to understand










  • Off the top of my head:

    • Allows using DoH/DoT/DoQUIC/recursive upstreams without installing extra packages (unbound, cloudflared, etc)
    • Allows acting as a DoH/DoH3/DoT/DoQUIC server alongside normal DNS over UDP and TCP
    • Allows configuring SOCKS/HTTP proxies for forwarders
    • Act as authoritative zone server with DNSSEC signing
    • Allows custom responses via plugins (e.g. conditional responses based on client’s IP addresses)
    • Accept PROXY Protocol to forward client IPs from trusted load balancers
    • All the clustering and zone transfers magic
    • DNS64

    It really dives deep into the inner workings of DNS and does pretty much anything Pi-Hole does, with many more security and QoL features. Although the UI may feel a bit dated, I’d recommend it to anyone running their own homelab infrastructure beyond just adblocking







  • If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I think it’s better hooking up Element Call to your current setup, and remove Element Web if you can BYO client.

    For a more lightweight alternative, I personally find continuwuity to be reasonably stable for the specs you mentioned. It does admin tasks in an #admins room, use an embedded database, and has no client UI so less containers needed. So continuwuity + EC should be able to run under the constraints you mentioned

    The lightest would still be any XMPP server, though its functionality does differ from Matrix overall