My last mac computer bit the dust a few years ago so I was using my iphone, ipad, and icloud. For mt things then stuff happened and I stopped using iCloud and do not have the money to replace my other devices quite yet so I have a hand full of raspberry pi’s attached to HDD’s, NVMe drives, and SSD’s. I currently have pihole running on 2 of them, I have a pi zero 2 running wireguard so that I can access my dns hosts, but it is not strong enough to access my self hosted Nextcloud on the go, for that I am told I should use at least a pi 4. My pi’s do a lot more than host nextcloud, pihole, and wireguard though!

In the not to distant future I will be retiring wireguard from that pi zero 2 and turning it into a pots server. I have grand ambitions to make a better home lab with a few more pi’s and to help me get away from big tech more.

The only thing google I have is an email I do not use but so I can watch YouTube, but I use unwatched to block ads.

The only thing apple is my iPhone and my iPad, when it becomes time to replace those I will have to figure out graphenOS and some Linux distro for a tablet of some sort.

I actually have Wireguard running on a pi zero 2, all it really does is provide me my pihole DNS.

Edit:

I should say I have pihole running on a couple of pi 5’s currently, overkill yes but one of my pi 4’s was sacrificed to the whims of magic smoke another was donated to a friend and another now hosts HAOS, I have a few pi zero 2’s (only one was sacrificial) the one that hosts wireguard has one of my last few working SD cards. The pi 5’s host many other things other than just pihole.

I have a .ca domain at hosthero and a .ca domain at easydns if you are in Canada I would recommend them. They offer more than .ca if you are not in Canada.

So my home lab has been raspberry pi’s of varying shapes and numbers for a few years. Recently my single floor condo flooded so half of my place has been ripped up and so much crap has been stuffed in the other half I decided I should get around to planning out a more complete home lab setup. Money is a bit tight but I called up my ISP and it turns out my internet package comes with two static IP addresses so I decided to snap those up. I will be building up a firewall with a pi 5, I will continue to use a pi 4 I have running HAOS, as I try to get out of all the ecosystems. I was born into the Apple ecosystem, the first computer I remember using was some old Apple DOS computer, so breaking out of that walled garden is going to be tough but it helps that Tim Apple gave Trump a golden Apple plaque so it hurts less with every service I turn off.

Any who because I have had a lot of time to make plans and game through my plan with AI I have decided I am going to self host my domain and email (Simple blog and 200+ annonomized email addresses) on a pi 5 that will be the third pi 5 after my firewall the first pi 5 will host things like immich, nextcloud, and the other things it is already doing one of those other things is pihole and that is where my DHCP is currently, I am on the fence about moving it to opnwrt or not. The Second pi 5 after the firewall also hosts a secondary pihole as a back up dns and all my high seas (like sonarr.tv) things and jellyfin.

To top it all off I am going to get another pi 4 with a hdd and I will ask for it to be hosted some where to do off site back ups.

As more of the world is moving into the #boycottUS movement more people are moving to open source alternatives. I personally wish more people would move to more open source things rather than alternative closed source things that could be sold to a US company.