Author: Christian Rakoot

Christian Rakoot, founder and author of Self Host Lab

Christian Rakoot is an industrial engineering and maintenance engineer who has been interested in computers since his first PC. It ran MS-DOS 3.22 on an Intel 286 with 4 MB of RAM, as best he remembers. Linux followed not long after, first Debian, then Mandrake.

He started programming in assembly, moved to Pascal and then Delphi, and later worked in C and the languages that came out of it. Small hardware kept his attention too, the Raspberry Pi in particular.

When fibre optic reached Madagascar more than fifteen years ago, hosting real services from home became worth doing. He has run mini PCs on Debian around the clock ever since, alongside Kimsufi servers for file storage and the applications that have no business sitting on a home connection. He prefers open source. None of his servers run Windows.

Jellyfin’s Project Leader and Two Core Team Members Step Down

Jellyfin lost its Project Leader, a long-serving core team member, and a co-founder inside a single week in July 2026.…

July 26, 20264 min read
Kodi Add-ons, Skins, and Live TV: Getting More Out of Kodi

The Kodi fiche covers what Kodi is and how to install it. This is what comes next: picking add-ons from…

July 18, 20264 min read
Mini PC Homelab: What Actually Runs Well (and What Doesn’t)

A mini PC picks up exactly where a Raspberry Pi taps out: Plex transcoding, TrueNAS, Proxmox, Immich. Here’s what an…

July 18, 20263 min read
Best Mini PCs for a Homelab in 2026

A mini PC sits between a Raspberry Pi and a full tower server: real x86 performance, actual RAM slots, often…

July 18, 20264 min read
OpenMediaVault on Raspberry Pi: Complete Setup Guide

OpenMediaVault is the only major NAS OS that officially supports the Raspberry Pi. Here’s the actual walkthrough: flashing the image,…

July 18, 20264 min read
Home Assistant Alternatives and the Self-Hosted Home Automation Stack

Home Assistant gets all the attention, but a real self-hosted smart home is usually a stack: a hub, protocol bridges…

July 18, 20267 min read
Self-Hosted Cloud Storage in 2026: Nextcloud vs. Seafile vs. Syncthing vs. Cloudreve

Google Drive fills up, Dropbox raises its price again, and suddenly self-hosting your own files looks appealing. The confusing part…

July 18, 20268 min read
Uptime Kuma: The Complete Guide to Self-Hosted Status Pages and Alerts

The self-hosted monitoring comparison covers Uptime Kuma as the tool for one specific question: is a service actually reachable right…

July 18, 20267 min read
Prometheus and Grafana Docker Compose: Build a Self-Hosted Monitoring Stack

The comparison of self-hosted monitoring tools covers why Prometheus and Grafana are usually the answer once a homelab outgrows a…

July 18, 20268 min read
Self-Hosted Monitoring in 2026: Netdata vs. Prometheus/Grafana vs. Uptime Kuma

At some point every homelab crosses a line. You go from three containers on a mini PC to a dozen…

July 18, 20268 min read