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.

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
Ollama Ships a New Interactive Agent Experience in the CLI
Ollama’s v0.32.0 and v0.32.1 releases turn the bare CLI into an interactive coding agent by default, rename the Codex integration…
July 18, 20264 min read
Forgejo v16.0 Ships SSRF Hardening, Granular Notifications, and JWT-Based Actions Integrations
Lire cet article en français : Forgejo v16.0 : durcissement SSRF, notifications par dépôt et intégrations Actions via JWT Forgejo,…
July 17, 20264 min read
Critical Gitea Docker Authentication Bypass Vulnerability Actively Exploited (CVE-2026-20896)
CVE-2026-20896 carries a CVSS score of 9.8, rated Critical, and it’s now being actively exploited against self-hosted Gitea instances that…
July 17, 20264 min read
The History of Docker
Docker began as a side project inside dotCloud, a struggling Paris-founded PaaS startup that pivoted its entire business around it…
July 17, 20266 min read
The History of Unraid
Unraid has never been open source, never been free, and never quite fit the usual homelab origin story. It started…
July 17, 20266 min read
The History of Proxmox VE
Proxmox VE started in 2005 as two Austrian brothers’ fix for OpenVZ’s missing backup tool, not a plan to dethrone…
July 17, 20266 min read
The History of Raspberry Pi
A $35 computer went on sale at exactly 6:00 a.m. GMT on February 29, 2012, and within minutes it had…
July 17, 20266 min read
The History of TrueNAS
Every corner of the homelab world has an origin story, and TrueNAS has one of the messier ones: a hobbyist…
July 17, 20267 min read
The History of Emby: How a Windows Media Center Plugin Became a Paid Media Server
Emby started in 2008 as Media Browser, a free Windows Media Center plugin. Here’s how it became a private company…
July 17, 20267 min read