I’m happy with 90 day certs for homelab stuff: I’m not worried about anyone MITMing my network. I figure the short lived certs are more important for people who provide services with a significant external user-base, or who process sensitive transactions.
I have my certbot set to check every 12 hours and renew at 60 days. Renewing every 3 days would be 20x more load on Let’s Encrypt systems, and that feels like abuse of a free service for my use case.
Tandoor definitely has a self-hosted path, including SSO integrations. It has a fair API that I’ve used to link it to nutrition data at USDA and my grocery store for prices. I suspect I could use the API to transfer a shopping list to the grocery store’s ordering system, but I don’t like the pickup or delivery systems. I’ve been pretty happy with tandoor’s import-from-web results, although the ingredient amounts often need some editing.
Also love the pi-0-2w, but I’ve started to use ESP32 for those edge sensors. You can get those for like $1-2 each on aliexpress, where real world prices on Pi zero is upwards of $20 now. Truly embedded systems like arduino were always intimidating to me, but esphome reduces ‘programming’ to a YAML for any of the many supported devices. The Pis that are working now aren’t likely to change any time soon, but I bought a handful of ESP32s for $10, and I’ll probably buy another handful before I buy another zero. Maybe convert a zero to ESP32 if I really need a whole OS for something new.
I feel like (mostly because of my own path) Pi is a great platform to get started with self hosting because of projects like pihole, homeassistant, and osmc. Projects where someone has put together simple, all-in-one solutions where you can just download an image and go. That same approach, and the Pi’s hardware limitations, make it harder to co-host multiple services, while the price point of Pi’s, at least pre-2023, made it reasonable just to run a handful of them. Only once you start wanting larger or more compute intensive stacks does the pressure to use containers/VMs on ‘real’ hardware appear. If you’ve already got pihole and ha running on Pis, there’s no pressure to move them to the big server.
If it’s the path I followed, it must be the path everyone follows :)
The 1U system I had, the heatsinks have been fanless and not the extruded aluminum block one usually thinks of, but an assembled stack of much thinner, more rigid fins. It relied on airflow from fans mounted in the middle of the case, between the mobo and disks, shrouded to focus that airflow. I want to say 2x40mm fans per processor.
You should expect a 1U system to run hotter than a desktop, and definitely hotter than cooler advertisers want. CPUs are designed to operate up to 100°C or so, and the constraints that lead people to use 1U form factors generally include replacing those systems regularly, basically because of burnout.
omg. Lamarkism? In 2026?