We use selected services to help with managing, in one way or another, all the things described in this documentation, and some that are not. The services we use are very briefly described in the sections below. They are broken down into two categories:
- External services — These are services:
- Provided by companies.
- Which, in most cases, charge a monthly or annual fee.
- Internal services: These services:
- Are installed and run on small, relatively inexpensive servers.
- Use free and ‘open’ software.
- Are connected to our home network.
- Are managed and maintained by us.
Each section title is a link to a page giving details about that service, for example, what it is used for, how we access it, how much it costs, etc.
External Services
External services are services provided by others. Here is a list of the external services we use and depend on, some more than others.
| Service | How It’s Used |
|---|---|
| 1Password | Protect and manage credentials1, lab server configuration data, and various other secrets. |
| Cloudflare | Domain registration and document website hosting |
| Docker | |
| Duke Energy | |
| GitHub | Maintain the source code for this documentation, and home automation and management script and configuration files. |
| DropBox | Offsite file backup and storage |
| Verizon Fios |
Internal Services
Internal Services, also called self-hosted services, are services installed and run on servers we own and maintain. At present, all our servers are Raspberry Pi’s with the exception of the QNAP NAS2.
| Service | How It’s Used |
|---|---|
| n8n | Home lab monitoring and management |
The N8N service
The AI service
The Web-Hosting service
t
The QNAP NAS
Refactor the QNAP service
This should be modeled as a device that has services running on it. Those might include the NAS, and possibly a service or services running within Docker on the QNAP server device.