What is eggnet?
eggnet is a home server — a mini PC (or a mini PC paired with a dedicated storage node) that runs the services a household actually uses, on hardware you own, with your data staying home.
It replaces a pile of subscriptions and cloud accounts with self-hosted equivalents, all reachable at clean https:// addresses, all behind a single login, all backed up on a schedule.
The one-paragraph version
Section titled “The one-paragraph version”A fanless mini PC runs Proxmox (a hypervisor) on a mirrored ZFS pool — all on one all-flash box, or split across a lean compute node and a dedicated storage node (the two shapes). Services live in lightweight containers. A reverse proxy gives each one a real HTTPS name; a self-hosted DNS server resolves those names locally and blocks ads network-wide. A self-hosted identity provider puts every app behind one sign-on. Everything is private by default over a mesh VPN, with a few things exposed publicly through a tunnel — no ports forwarded, no home IP leaked. Secrets live in a secrets manager, not scattered in config files. Backups run to a separate drive, with an offsite copy.
What it serves
Section titled “What it serves”| Category | What you get |
|---|---|
| Media | Stream a movie/TV library to any device; hardware-transcoded. |
| Photos | Phone auto-backup, timeline, sharing — a private Google Photos. |
| Documents | Scan-to-searchable archive with OCR; full-text search. |
| Knowledge | Bookmarks with archiving, notes, a résumé builder. |
| Home | Budgeting, home-automation bridge, file shares. |
| Infra | DNS + ad-blocking, reverse proxy, identity/SSO, secrets, monitoring, backups. |
One box, or two?
Section titled “One box, or two?”You do not need a rack, a NAS, and three Raspberry Pis to run a serious homelab. A modern mini PC with multiple NVMe slots has more than enough CPU, RAM, and fast storage for a household’s worth of services — while drawing a few watts, making no noise, and fitting on a shelf. That’s the simplest shape, and often all you need.
Grow past a few TB, or want to stop compute and storage sharing one CPU, and the second shape is a lean compute node beside a dedicated storage node — cheap redundant bulk on HDDs, a strong CPU/GPU next to the media it serves, and the freedom to reboot one without downing the other. The hardware guide lays both out side by side so you can pick.
Either way, the tradeoff to design around is blast radius: on one box, when it’s down everything’s down; splitting into two shrinks that but adds a network path and a second machine to keep alive. Most of these guides are about keeping whichever shape you pick reboot-tolerant and its data recoverable.
How to read these guides
Section titled “How to read these guides”They’re ordered roughly in build order, but each stands alone:
- The philosophy — the handful of rules that keep a lab sane.
- Hardware & Proxmox base — one box or two, ZFS, the hypervisor.
- LXC vs Docker — where each service should actually run.
- Networking — reverse proxy, split-horizon DNS, VPN, tunnel.
- Single sign-on — one identity provider in front of everything.
- Secrets — get credentials out of your config files.
- Storage & backups — the part people skip until it’s too late.
- Monitoring — know it broke before a family member tells you.
Nothing here is exotic. It’s boring, well-worn tools wired together carefully — which is exactly what you want running your family’s photos.