TechHut’s 2025 Homelab Guide: The Wong Edan Edition
Welcome to the Digital Asylum: Why Your Cloud is Just Someone Else’s Problem
Greetings, fellow data hoarders, bandwidth junkies, and those of you who find more joy in a blinking green LED than in human interaction. Welcome to my digital sanctuary. They call me “Wong Edan”—the crazy one—because while the rest of the world is busy handing over their digital souls (and twenty bucks a month) to Netflix, Google, and Amazon, I’m sitting here in a room that sounds like a jet engine, surrounded by enterprise-grade hardware that I definitely don’t need but absolutely must have. Why? Because I can. Because TechHut (shout out to Brandon Hopkins) just dropped the 2025 definitive guide to homelab services, and if you aren’t running these, are you even living?
Stop relying on the “Cloud.” The Cloud is just a fancy marketing term for a server in a basement in Virginia that you don’t own. In this manifesto, we are diving deep—and I mean “kernel-level deep”—into the MUST HAVE services for 2025. We’re talking media empires, photo sovereignty, and network management that would make an enterprise sysadmin weep with envy. Grab a caffeinated beverage, kick your UPS, and let’s get into the technical weeds of the TechHut.tv stack.
1. The Command Center: Homarr and the Art of the Dashboard
If you have more than five services running and you’re still typing in IP addresses and port numbers like a caveman, you are doing it wrong. Your homelab needs a face. Brandon highlights Homarr as the premier dashboard for 2025. It’s not just a collection of bookmarks; it’s a living, breathing status monitor for your digital empire.
Homarr allows you to integrate your Docker containers directly, showing you real-time stats without having to jump into Portainer or the terminal. You want to see if your Plex stream is transcoding or if your latest Linux ISO download is finished? You put it on the dashboard. It’s about aesthetics and efficiency—mostly aesthetics, because we all want our labs to look like a scene from a 90s hacker movie.
“A homelab without a dashboard is just a box of parts. A homelab with Homarr is a localized superpower.”
Configuration in Docker is straightforward, but for the true ‘Wong Edan’ experience, you’ll want to map your icons and internal DNS correctly so your family thinks you’re a genius instead of a guy who spends too much on eBay server racks.
2. The Media Empire: Plex, Jellyfin, and the Seer Evolution
Let’s talk about the heavy hitters. In the TechHut 2025 lineup, Plex and Jellyfin remain the dual kings. Whether you prefer the polished, “it just works” nature of Plex or the open-source, “privacy-first” ethos of Jellyfin, you need a media server. But a server is nothing without content, and managing that content manually is for people with too much free time.
Enter the *arr stack. If you aren’t running Radarr (movies), Sonarr (TV shows), and Prowlarr (indexer management), you are essentially manually laboring in the digital salt mines. Prowlarr acts as the bridge, synchronizing your indexers across all services so you don’t have to configure your trackers fifteen times like a madman.
The biggest update in the TechHut ecosystem for 2025? Overseerr is now Seer. This migration is critical. Seer provides the request management layer that lets your “users” (read: your ungrateful cousins who want to watch the latest 4K blockbuster) request content through a beautiful interface. It then pokes Sonarr or Radarr, which pokes your download client, which pokes your storage. It’s a beautiful, automated circle of life.
# Example Snippet for the *arr Stack integration
# Ensure your API keys are synced via Prowlarr
# Seer (formerly Overseerr) connects via:
# Settings -> Services -> Add Server
3. Digital Sovereignty: Immich vs. The Big Tech Photo Monopoly
If there is one service that Brandon Hopkins champions as a “must-have” for 2025, it is Immich. Look, we’ve all been burned by Google Photos. One day it’s free, the next day they’re charging you for every pixel of your cat photos. Immich is the high-performance, self-hosted backup solution that actually rivals the “big boys” in terms of UI and feature set.
Immich isn’t just a folder of JPGs. It features facial recognition, object detection, and a mobile app that actually auto-uploads reliably. It’s heavy on resources because it’s doing machine learning on your local hardware—which is exactly why we bought those power-hungry CPUs, isn’t it? Running Immich on a dedicated Docker stack with a Redis database and a PostgreSQL backend is the hallmark of a mature homelab. It says, “I own my memories, and no, Google, you cannot use them to train your latest AI chatbot.”
4. The Infrastructure Layer: Dockhand and Fedora Server
Let’s get technical. How are we running all this? While Proxmox remains the king of hypervisors for many, TechHut’s latest insights lean heavily into Fedora Server utilizing Cockpit, ZFS, and Podman/Docker. Fedora provides that “leading edge” (but not quite “bleeding edge”) stability that homelabbers crave.
A standout tool mentioned is Dockhand. If you are running Docker, you need to check out Dockhand. It’s about simplifying the management of your containerized life. Managing volumes, networks, and environment variables can become a spaghetti-code nightmare. Dockhand helps you keep the “Edan” (madness) under control by providing a structured way to handle your stacks.
And then there’s ZFS. If your data isn’t on a ZFS pool with snapshots and scrub tasks, do you even care about your data? TechHut emphasizes using ZFS on Fedora to ensure that even if a drive decides to go to the great silicon graveyard, your precious media and Immich backups remain intact.
# Basic ZFS Status Check
zpool status -v
# Remember: RAID is not a backup, but it helps you sleep at night!
5. The Network Watchdog: Pi-hole and Unifi Integration
Your network is the nervous system of your homelab. If the nervous system is clogged with ads and tracking telemetry, the whole body suffers. Pi-hole (or AdGuard Home, for the contrarians among us) is a mandatory service. It acts as a DNS sinkhole, killing ads at the network level before they even reach your browser. Brandon’s setup often involves Unifi gear, which, while expensive, provides the “single pane of glass” management that satisfies our obsessive-compulsive need for data visualization.
The “correct” way to build this, as discussed in the TechHut community, often involves segregating your homelab services into different VLANs. Your “untrusted” IoT devices (that “smart” lightbulb that’s definitely spying on you) should never be on the same network as your Seer instance or your ZFS storage. It’s about “Zero Trust” within your own four walls.
6. Automation and Monitoring: n8n and Grafana
Why do something twice when you can spend ten hours failing to automate it? That is the homelabber’s creed. n8n is the workflow automation tool that TechHut highlights for those who want to move beyond simple IFTTT-style logic. Whether it’s automating backups, sending notifications to Discord when a service goes down, or syncing data between APIs, n8n is the glue of the modern lab.
And then, there is the vanity. Grafana. Coupled with Prometheus or InfluxDB, Grafana allows you to create those glorious dashboards that show CPU temperatures, network throughput, and power consumption. Does knowing your server is drawing 400 watts make it run faster? No. Does it make you feel like the captain of a starship? Absolutely.
Wong Edan’s Verdict: The Path to Digital Enlightenment
Listen, you beautiful disasters. Building a homelab isn’t about saving money. By the time you factor in the hardware, the electricity bill, and the hours of troubleshooting why a Docker container won’t mount a SMB share, you’ve spent more than a lifetime subscription to every streaming service on Earth. But that’s not the point.
The point is control. Following the TechHut.tv “Must Have” list for 2025—from Homarr and Seer to Immich and Dockhand—is about reclaiming your digital footprint. It’s about building a fortress that stays standing even when the “real” internet goes down. Brandon Hopkins has laid out the blueprint; I’ve given you the ‘Wong Edan’ motivation. Now, stop reading this and go update your docker-compose.yml files. Your servers are waiting, and those fans aren’t going to spin themselves.
Stay crazy, stay self-hosted, and for the love of all that is holy, back up your config files.