Homelab Glossary · Hosting & Cloud

5G home internet: fixed-wireless service from a cellular carrier to a home gateway, a common backup line that typically sits behind carrier-grade NAT and is deprioritized under congestion (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
95th percentile billing: a bandwidth commit where the provider samples traffic every five minutes in each direction, discards the top 5% of samples and bills the higher of ingress and egress at the remaining peak (From Homelab to Colocation).
Access port: a switch port facing a device that doesn't speak VLANs, where the switch adds the VLAN tag on ingress and strips it on egress (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
AdGuard Home: a GPL-3.0 DNS sinkhole shipped as one Go binary, with encrypted DNS (DoH, DoT, DNSCrypt) built in, per-client settings and optional DHCP (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
ArchiveBox: an MIT-licensed personal web archive that saves each URL, bookmark or feed item as HTML, a SingleFile copy, PDF, screenshot, WARC and media, so a cited page outlives its site (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Array (Unraid): Unraid's original storage design, where each data disk keeps its own filesystem and one or two parity disks hold real-time parity across all of them, so mixed disk sizes can join and a read spins up one disk (NAS & Home Storage).
ashift: the ZFS setting for a device's sector alignment, ashift=12 for 4K-sector disks, fixed when the device first joins a pool and never changeable afterward (NAS & Home Storage).
ASN (from ARIN): an autonomous system number, which ARIN issues singly to any organization on request, the first step to announcing addresses of one's own over BGP (From Homelab to Colocation).
AT&T IP Passthrough: the mode AT&T fiber gateways use instead of a full bridge, handing the gateway's WAN address to one device, which loses the gateway's firewall and so must be a real firewall (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
awesome-selfhosted: the reference catalog of Free Software network services and web applications that can be hosted on one's own servers, with non-free software kept on a separate page (The Homelab).
AWQ: a 4-bit, weight-only quantization method that protects the weights that matter most to activations, run by vLLM and Transformers (AI at Home).
Backup class: the homelab's grouping of data (critical, standard, VMs, none) that sets each class's local copy, second machine, offsite copy, retention and restore-test schedule (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Backup line: a low-rate or low-cap internet line kept only for failover, such as a satellite standby plan or a cellular backup, typically behind carrier-grade NAT (From Homelab to Colocation).
Blended transit: retail colocation bandwidth bought by the provider from several carriers and routed over them, so one carrier's outage is the provider's problem, as opposed to single-carrier transit (From Homelab to Colocation).
BorgBackup: a BSD-3-Clause deduplicating, encrypting file-level backup program that stores to any remote host reachable over SSH (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
bpg/proxmox: the maintained MPL-2.0 Terraform and OpenTofu provider for Proxmox VE, authenticating with an API token and needing SSH to the nodes only for a few operations (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Bridge mode: an ISP gateway setting (Xfinity's Bridge Mode, for example) that turns off the gateway's router and private Wi-Fi and keeps only the modem, so one router of the owner's owns NAT, firewall and the queue (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Bufferbloat: latency that climbs under load because a queue forms in the modem or the ISP's equipment, fixed with smart queue management on the home router and measured as latency under load (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Cable schedule: a record of every network cable run, labeled at both ends, with its tested result (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
cake: the CAKE queueing discipline used for SQM on OpenWrt (with piece_of_cake.qos), with cake-autorate adjusting its rate from measured latency on variable links such as LTE, 5G and Starlink (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT): an ISP's own NAT in front of customer links numbered from 100.64.0.0/10 (RFC 6598), which stops inbound connections reaching the home whatever the router does (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Cat 5e: the cable category rated to 100 MHz that runs gigabit at 100 m and, under 802.3bz, 2.5G and in most cases 5G over the installed base, which makes existing runs worth keeping (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Cat 6: the cable category rated to 250 MHz that carries 5G to 100 m but 10GBASE-T only over shorter runs, depending on alien crosstalk (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Cat 6A: the cable category rated to 500 MHz and the only one rated for 10GBASE-T at the full 100 m, so the default for new runs (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Cat 8: a shielded-only category for short top-of-rack and end-of-row server links with at most two connectors, not a better house cable (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Channel model (TIA-568): the cabling rule of a 90 m permanent link of solid cable plus up to 10 m of patch cords, 100 m in all, with stranded cable reserved for cords (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Cloudflare Access: Cloudflare's identity check in front of a tunnel's public hostname, where every Access application is deny by default and an Allow policy names the people let in (Exposing Home Services).
Cloudflare Tunnel: an outbound connection from cloudflared at home to Cloudflare that publishes services without an open inbound port, at the cost that Cloudflare terminates TLS, sees the plaintext and can suspend the hostname under its terms (Exposing Home Services).
community.proxmox: the Ansible collection that manages Proxmox VMs, instances, storage, firewalls and backups, offers a proxmox inventory plugin and reaches into LXC containers through pct over SSH (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Connector (cloudflared): each running cloudflared process on a Cloudflare Tunnel; several connectors on one tunnel act as replicas, each sending traffic to the nearest Cloudflare data center (Exposing Home Services).
Consumer mesh: app-managed home Wi-Fi systems (eero, TP-Link Deco, Netgear Orbi, ASUS) whose nodes link over wireless backhaul, with feature sets that vary by model and sometimes depend on a subscription (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Copper-clad aluminum (CCA): network cable with aluminum conductors coated in copper, which fails the NEC and UL requirement for copper conductors in communications cable and should never be installed (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Corosync: the Proxmox VE cluster stack, which needs low, steady latency between nodes rather than bandwidth, ideally on a dedicated link, because storage or backup traffic on the same link can break quorum (Hypervisors at Home).
Data caps: monthly transfer limits on residential internet plans, fading on new plans but still applied to some legacy ones with overage charges (From Homelab to Colocation).
Dataset (ZFS): a filesystem inside a ZFS pool with its own properties (compression, record size, quota, encryption) and its own snapshots, ideally one per app so snapshots and restores are per app (NAS & Home Storage).
DERP: Tailscale's relay servers, used as the last resort when hard NAT or firewalls prevent a direct path; relayed traffic stays end-to-end encrypted and a DERP server can't decrypt it (Exposing Home Services).
DevDocs: an MPL-2.0 documentation browser with an offline mode that downloads documentation sets into the browser, also published as a self-hosted image (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
DGX Spark: NVIDIA's small unified-memory AI machine with 128 GB of LPDDR5X, high in capacity but low in bandwidth next to a discrete GPU, suited to large mixture-of-experts models; several units can be clustered (AI at Home).
Distribution (registry): the CNCF project that was Docker Registry, the minimal choice for a LAN container registry so images built at home are not pulled across the uplink on every deploy (From Homelab to Colocation).
DIY tower: a self-assembled server from consumer parts, often with an iGPU and an HBA for more drives, with IPMI only on server-class boards, typically used as NAS plus apps plus transcoding (The Homelab).
Docker Compose: the Apache-2.0 Docker CLI plugin (docker compose) that runs multi-container apps from YAML, the portable, diffable app runtime for a homelab when kept in Git (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
DOCSIS: the cable internet standard, where DOCSIS 3.1 modems offer far more download than upload and DOCSIS 4.0 raises upstream through Full Duplex or Extended Spectrum DOCSIS; deployed plans offer far less than the specification (From Homelab to Colocation).
DuckDNS: a free, donation-funded dynamic DNS service whose client calls an update URL with a token; it uses the caller's address but cannot detect IPv6, which has to be passed explicitly (Exposing Home Services).
Dynamic DNS (DDNS): a service that updates a hostname whenever a residential IPv4 address changes, the name half of a port forward (Exposing Home Services).
eero Internet Backup: eero's failover to a phone hotspot or another Wi-Fi network, offered to eero Plus subscribers and select ISP customers rather than every owner (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Emby: a media server, proprietary since version 4, that sells features through its Emby Premiere subscription (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
EXL2 / EXL3: ExLlama's quantization formats, mixing precision per layer to hit any average bits per weight between 2 and 8 (AI at Home).
ExLlamaV2 / ExLlamaV3: MIT-licensed NVIDIA CUDA runtimes built for fast single-user inference on consumer cards; V3 adds tensor and expert parallelism across GPUs, and V2 is archived in favor of V3 (AI at Home).
Exposure class: the homelab inventory field (none, lan, proxy-allowlist, public) recording how each service is reached, who authenticates it and how fast it is patched (Exposing Home Services).
Flent: an on-demand network load-testing tool whose RRUL test measures latency while saturating the line, used with IRTT for precise round-trip times (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
FLUX.1: a 12B image model family whose [dev] weights are non-commercial (outputs usable commercially) and whose [schnell] variant is Apache 2.0 (AI at Home).
Forwardings (OpenWrt): OpenWrt firewall entries that permit traffic from one zone to another in one direction only (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
FP8: an 8-bit floating-point format (E4M3, E5M2) for Hopper and newer GPUs and RTX 40 and 50 cards, which large evaluations found effectively lossless across model scales (AI at Home).
Funnel (Tailscale): the exception to Tailscale's private-only model, routing public internet traffic to a tailnet device on a few fixed ports under non-configurable bandwidth limits, in beta (Exposing Home Services).
Gateway group: the pfSense and OPNsense dual-WAN construct that groups WAN gateways into tiers, where gateways on one tier load-balance and gateways on different tiers fail over, selected by a LAN rule (From Homelab to Colocation).
GGUF K-quants and I-quants: llama.cpp's quantization formats from about 2 to 8.5 bits per weight, run by every llama.cpp backend, Ollama and LM Studio, with an importance matrix from calibration text reducing loss (AI at Home).
Gitea Actions: Gitea's built-in CI with GitHub-style workflow syntax and act_runner as its agent, so a forge and its CI can both live on the LAN (From Homelab to Colocation).
gpt-oss: OpenAI's Apache 2.0 open-weight mixture-of-experts models, shipped in MXFP4, whose half-windowed attention layers cut memory, so the larger runs on a single 80 GB GPU (AI at Home).
GPTQ: a second-order post-training quantization method at 3 to 4 bits, weight-only, run by vLLM and Transformers (AI at Home).
Grants (Tailscale): the entries in a tailnet policy file that say which sources may reach which destinations and ports, alongside groups, tagOwners and tests that fail a change breaking an expected path (Exposing Home Services).
Grouped-query attention: a model design where many query heads share a few key-value heads, which is what makes the KV cache affordable at long context (AI at Home).
Harvester: SUSE's open-source hypervisor built on Kubernetes with KubeVirt and Longhorn, running VMs through Kubernetes (Hypervisors at Home).
Headscale: a self-hosted control plane for Tailscale clients, giving the same traffic path as Tailscale while the owner runs and patches the control plane (Exposing Home Services).
Home Assistant: the Apache-2.0 home automation platform funded by Nabu Casa's subscribers, installed either as Home Assistant OS, the recommended embedded operating system, or as Home Assistant Container, where the owner handles updates and apps are unsupported (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
home.arpa: the domain reserved by RFC 8375 for names that exist only inside a house, used instead of an invented TLD that leaks to the root (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Hybrid Mesh Backup (TP-Link Deco): Deco's failover in which a 4G/5G Deco with an active SIM backs up the whole network and switches back automatically when the main line returns (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Hyper-V: Microsoft's hypervisor, a feature of Windows Pro and Enterprise and Windows Server; the free standalone Hyper-V Server ended with its 2019 release (Hypervisors at Home).
Immich: an AGPL-3.0 self-hosted photo and video service, shipped as a Compose stack, whose core team is employed by FUTO and which sells an optional key while promising never to paywall features (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Incus: the community-led fork of LXD from the Linux Containers project, managing system containers and VMs with LXC and QEMU under Apache-2.0 (Hypervisors at Home).
Ingress rules (cloudflared): the ordered list in a locally managed tunnel's config.yml mapping hostname and optional path to a local service, which must end with a catch-all rule (Exposing Home Services).
Inter-VLAN rules: the firewall rules between home segments, default deny with exceptions only for the flows a household actually uses, without which segmentation means nothing (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Internet-in-a-Box: an installable bundle of the offline internet: Kiwix, OER2Go and Archive.org content packs, learning videos and education apps such as Kolibri, Moodle and Nextcloud (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
IOMMU: the CPU and board feature (Intel VT-d or AMD-Vi), enabled in firmware, that PCIe passthrough requires to give a VM direct control of a device (Hypervisors at Home).
IOMMU groups: the units in which the IOMMU isolates devices; only a whole group can be passed through, and grouping depends on the board's PCIe layout and ACS support, so it is checked before buying a board (Hypervisors at Home).
IPv6 prefix delegation: the RFC 7084 behavior where a home router requests a prefix from the ISP with DHCPv6 (IA_PD), sized for a /64 on each of its interfaces (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
ISP-supplied gateway: the ISP's combined modem, router and Wi-Fi box, whose firmware, queueing and Wi-Fi placement stay under the ISP's control, which is why bridge mode or IP Passthrough matters (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Jellyfin: a GPL-2.0 volunteer media server with no premium licenses or features, trading paywalls for volunteer capacity (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Kiwix: a nonprofit that packages websites such as Wikipedia as ZIM files, highly compressed archives readable in its apps or served on a network by kiwix-serve (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
kiwix-serve: Kiwix's GPLv3 HTTP daemon that serves ZIM files on a network, also shipped as a container image (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Kokoro-82M: an Apache 2.0 text-to-speech model with 82M parameters (AI at Home).
KV cache: the key and value vectors a model stores per layer for every token in context, sized at 2 x layers x KV heads x head dimension x bytes per element per token, the hidden variable in memory sizing (AI at Home).
KVM with libvirt: the Linux kernel hypervisor managed through libvirt on any Linux host, the base that won the home tier (Hypervisors at Home).
LibreNMS: an SNMP monitoring system for switches, access points and router interfaces (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
llama.cpp: the MIT-licensed GGUF runtime for CPU, CUDA, Metal, Vulkan, ROCm and SYCL, whose llama-server offers partial GPU offload and an OpenAI-compatible API (AI at Home).
LM Studio: a desktop app for running GGUF and, on Apple Silicon, MLX models, free for work use, with a headless daemon and OpenAI-style endpoints (AI at Home).
Local zones (Unbound): Unbound's local DNS records, where a static zone answers only from local data and returns NXDOMAIN for anything else, and a redirect zone answers every name under it with one record (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
LXC: Linux system containers, as run in Proxmox VE, that share the host kernel, are unprivileged by default, start in seconds and suit a single Linux service; a VM is needed for another kernel (Hypervisors at Home).
LXD: the Linux Containers project's manager for system containers and VMs until Canonical took it in house, which led to the Incus fork (Hypervisors at Home).
mergerfs: a FUSE union filesystem that presents many disks' paths as one mount with policies for where new files go, explicitly without redundancy, usually paired with SnapRAID (NAS & Home Storage).
Mesh (Wi-Fi): access points linked to each other over radio, where every wireless hop spends airtime twice, which is why wired backhaul beats it (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Mini PC: low-power x86 boxes and 1-liter business desktops (N100 boxes, HP Elite Mini, Lenovo Tiny, Dell Micro), quiet and cheap to run but limited in memory and drives, the default for always-on services (The Homelab).
Minimum routable prefix: the smallest block the internet will carry, a /24 of IPv4 or a /48 of IPv6, because smaller subnets are filtered (From Homelab to Colocation).
MLX: Apple's MIT-licensed array framework for Apple Silicon's unified memory, whose mlx-lm runs language models and whose models LM Studio can serve (AI at Home).
MoCA: Ethernet over existing coax, which turns a cable TV outlet into wired backhaul for an access point (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Modified MIT License: a model license label used by some open-weight releases that adds conditions to MIT, ranging from a name display requirement to barring large companies outright, so the license file must be read, not the tag (AI at Home).
Mover (Unraid): the Unraid job that migrates files from a fast pool to the array on a schedule, according to each share's primary and secondary locations (NAS & Home Storage).
MXFP4: the OCP microscaling 4-bit format (E2M1 with one power-of-two scale per 32 values) that gpt-oss ships in, accelerated on Blackwell (AI at Home).
NAS appliance: a storage box from Synology, QNAP, TerraMaster or UGREEN that hides its operating system behind a vendor web UI, low-effort storage subject to the vendor's drive policy and OS lifecycle (The Homelab).
Network UPS Tools (NUT): GPL software that supports UPSes and power devices through one protocol; upsd serves a UPS's state and upsmon on each host shuts secondaries down first and the attached primary last (The Homelab).
Nextcloud: an AGPL-3.0 platform for file sync, sharing, office and calendars, with a paid Enterprise edition per user (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Nginx Proxy Manager: nginx with a web UI in a Docker image, with proxy hosts and built-in Let's Encrypt, whose configuration lives in its database rather than in Git (Exposing Home Services).
No-IP: a dynamic DNS provider whose free plan gives one hostname on its own domains, with custom domains on a paid plan (Exposing Home Services).
NVFP4: NVIDIA's 4-bit format (E2M1 with an FP8 scale per 16 values, about 4.5 bits) for Blackwell Tensor Cores, including RTX 50 cards (AI at Home).
Ollama: an MIT-licensed model server that manages loading and unloading GGUF models from its own registry, with a native API and an OpenAI-compatible /v1, sizing its default context by VRAM (AI at Home).
Open WebUI: the common front end for local models, with chats, knowledge bases, web search, speech, image generation, Python tools and MCP, against Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible API (AI at Home).
OpenWrt: open-source replacement firmware for consumer routers on Linux and nftables (fw4), whose firewall groups interfaces into zones with forwardings between them (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
OpenZFS: the CDDL-licensed ZFS project, run on a general OS such as Debian, Proxmox VE or FreeBSD, free but with all management by hand and the module out of tree (NAS & Home Storage).
OPNsense: a BSD 2-clause router and firewall distribution on FreeBSD's pf, forked from pfSense, with Unbound blocklists and WireGuard built in (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Optic coding: vendor fields in a transceiver's EEPROM that some enterprise switches read to refuse optics they don't recognize, the source of SFP lock-in (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Organic Maps: an Apache 2.0 phone map app built on OpenStreetMap data that supports every feature without an internet connection (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
OsmAnd: a phone map app with fully offline maps of any region and offline navigation, built on OpenStreetMap data (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Parity array versus pool: the main split in home storage: independent disks with parity beside them grow one disk at a time and lose only failed disks, while striped pools are faster and checksummed but grow in fixed shapes (NAS & Home Storage).
Path diversity: using backup links of a different type over different cable paths, because links from the same provider tend to fail together (From Homelab to Colocation).
Peer (WireGuard): a key pair and a list of Allowed IPs, with no session negotiation and nothing that answers an unauthenticated packet; keys are distributed by hand (Exposing Home Services).
pfSense CE: Netgate's free Apache-2.0 router and firewall distribution on FreeBSD's pf, descended from m0n0wall, with most development effort now going to pfSense Plus (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
pfSense Plus: Netgate's proprietary productized build of pfSense, included on Netgate appliances and sold per instance elsewhere (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Pi-hole: an open-source DNS sinkhole on dnsmasq (FTL) that blocks ads and trackers for the house, with optional DHCP; run as a pair, because a single resolver is the classic outage (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Plex Media Server: a proprietary media server with polished clients on almost every TV and console, which charges remote viewers through Plex Pass and a Remote Watch Pass (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
PMTiles: Protomaps' single-file archive format for tiled map data, read by clients with HTTP range requests so a static file server serves a map with no tile server (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
PoE budget: the total class power a switch must supply, summed from each access point's and camera's PoE class rather than its typical draw (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Pool (Unraid): Btrfs or ZFS storage beside the Unraid array for cache, VMs and containers, recommended for all-flash servers (NAS & Home Storage).
Pool (ZFS): ZFS's combined volume manager and filesystem, built from vdevs that writes stripe across, so losing any vdev loses the pool (NAS & Home Storage).
Port forward plus DDNS: the inbound method of exposing a home service, sending internet traffic straight to the home's public IP, reachable by anyone and unusable behind CGNAT (Exposing Home Services).
Portainer: a container management UI shipped as a container image, with a Zlib Community Edition and a paid Business Edition (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Powerline: adapters (HomePlug AV2, G.hn) that carry Ethernet over electrical wiring, the last resort before mesh, with throughput that depends on the circuit (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Prometheus blackbox_exporter: an Apache-2.0 exporter that turns ICMP, HTTP, DNS and TCP probes into metrics for Grafana and alerting (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Prosumer, controller-managed networking: UniFi, OpenWrt or a pfSense or OPNsense box with standalone access points, giving VLANs, SQM, multi-WAN, per-port PoE and monitoring, where the owner's configuration is the risk (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Proxmox Backup Server (PBS): Proxmox's AGPLv3 backup server, written in Rust, that takes incremental, server-deduplicated, client-encrypted backups of VMs, containers and hosts and syncs to a remote PBS (Hypervisors at Home).
Proxmox Datacenter Manager: an AGPLv3 single view across several Proxmox VE clusters, nodes and PBS instances, with cross-cluster live migration, which a one-cluster homelab doesn't need (Hypervisors at Home).
Proxmox VE: the Debian-based hypervisor with KVM/QEMU and LXC, every feature free and a subscription buying only the enterprise update repository and support, the homelab default (Hypervisors at Home).
Proxmox VE repositories: the update channels (pve-enterprise for subscribers, and the free no-subscription repository that receives updates first), which are what a subscription sells instead of features (Hypervisors at Home).
QAT checkpoint: a model checkpoint trained for low precision (quantization-aware training), usually 4-bit, instead of rounded after training (AI at Home).
QDevice: an external third vote for a two-node Proxmox cluster, corosync-qnetd on an independent machine with corosync-qdevice on each node, discouraged on clusters with an odd node count (Hypervisors at Home).
QTS: QNAP's NAS operating system on ext4 over classic RAID (NAS & Home Storage).
Quorum (cluster): the vote count a cluster needs to change configuration; high availability needs at least three votes, from three nodes or two plus a QDevice, and a node out of quorum refuses changes (Hypervisors at Home).
QuTS hero: QNAP's ZFS-based NAS operating system with self-healing, inline deduplication and compression, and triple-parity and triple-mirror layouts (NAS & Home Storage).
r/homelab: the Reddit community about home hardware, racks, networking and the lab itself, one of the hobby's two public squares (The Homelab).
r/selfhosted: the Reddit community about the software people run on their own hardware (The Homelab).
RAIDZ: a ZFS vdev with single, double or triple parity (RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3) tolerating one, two or three device failures, the alternative to a mirror (NAS & Home Storage).
RAIDZ expansion: the OpenZFS feature (zpool attach to a RAIDZ vdev) that widens an existing RAIDZ vdev by one disk, where before a home user had to add a whole vdev or replace every disk (NAS & Home Storage).
Repatriation in miniature: the homelab as a swap of metered rent for a fixed cost of hardware, electricity and the owner's hours, the same calculation companies make leaving the cloud (The Homelab).
Residential cable or fiber: home internet sold in download-weighted speed tiers with dynamic public IPv4 and an AUP that limits use to personal, non-commercial purposes, unlike business plans with static blocks (From Homelab to Colocation).
restic: a BSD-2-Clause deduplicating, encrypting file-level backup program that writes to local disks, SFTP, its REST server, S3-compatible storage and other clouds (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Ride-through: keeping a lab running through a long power outage, which takes a home battery or generator; a UPS only buys a clean shutdown (From Homelab to Colocation).
Sanoid and syncoid: a GPL-3.0 policy-driven ZFS snapshot manager and its companion that replicates datasets over SSH with incremental zfs send (NAS & Home Storage).
Scrub (ZFS): a scheduled read of every block in a pool that finds and repairs silent corruption from redundancy before a second failure makes it unrecoverable (NAS & Home Storage).
SGLang: an Apache 2.0 GPU model server with the RadixAttention prefix cache and structured generation behind an OpenAI-compatible API (AI at Home).
Smart queue management (SQM): shaping traffic slightly below the ISP's rate so the queue forms in the home router, where a fair-queueing AQM such as CAKE or FQ_CoDel manages it, the fix for bufferbloat (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
SMART self-test: a drive's own short or long self-test; rising reallocated or pending sectors or a failed test mean ordering or fitting a replacement (NAS & Home Storage).
SmokePing: a tool that graphs latency and loss distribution over time to many targets, the classic "smoke" graph (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
SnapRAID: GPL-3.0 parity computed only on request (snapraid sync) over disks that each keep an ordinary filesystem, with scrubs against checksums; new files stay unprotected until the next sync (NAS & Home Storage).
Snapshot (ZFS): an instant copy-on-write point-in-time view of a dataset, which zfs send turns into a stream, whole or incremental, that another pool can receive (NAS & Home Storage).
Special, log and cache vdevs: ZFS support devices that change performance, not redundancy: a special vdev holds metadata (and is part of the pool, so needs full redundancy), a log device absorbs synchronous writes, and a cache device is a second-level read cache (NAS & Home Storage).
Stable Diffusion: Stability AI's image model family, whose licenses run from CreativeML OpenRAIL-M on 1.x to the Stability AI Community License on 3.5, which ends above a revenue threshold (AI at Home).
Starlink Standby Mode: a low-cost Starlink plan with unlimited data at a low speed, kept as a backup line, which may not reactivate to a full plan in a congested cell (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Strix Halo: AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ unified-memory platform, letting much of its memory serve as graphics memory for large models at a fraction of a discrete GPU's bandwidth (AI at Home).
Subnet router (Tailscale): a tailnet node that advertises a LAN prefix, putting a whole VLAN on the tailnet without a client on each device (Exposing Home Services).
Synology drive policy: Synology's policy on its 2025 Plus models that drives not Synology-branded or certified lost storage pool creation, health monitoring and firmware updates, the risk of a vendor selling the whole box (NAS & Home Storage).
Synology DSM: Synology's proprietary NAS operating system, Btrfs volumes on Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) or classic RAID, sold with the hardware (NAS & Home Storage).
Tailscale: a WireGuard overlay with a hosted control plane that distributes keys and handles NAT traversal so devices connect directly, falling back to DERP relays, reachable only by tailnet members (Exposing Home Services).
Telmate/proxmox: the older MIT-licensed Terraform provider for Proxmox that provisions QEMU VMs and LXC containers, with known limitations listed in its README (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
tileserver-gl: a server that serves vector tiles from MBTiles files to MapLibre GL JS, Leaflet and OpenLayers, with optional server-side raster rendering (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Traefik: a reverse proxy that reads routes from Docker labels; its Docker provider routes every container by default unless exposedByDefault is set to false (Exposing Home Services).
TrueNAS CORE: iXsystems' open-source ZFS NAS on FreeBSD, the renamed FreeNAS, now at its final release (NAS & Home Storage).
TrueNAS SCALE (Community Edition): iXsystems' ZFS NAS on Debian Linux with Linux containers and KVM, now TrueNAS Community Edition, whose apps moved from Kubernetes (k3s) to Docker (NAS & Home Storage).
Trunk port: a switch link carrying several tagged VLANs, such as the firewall-to-switch link or the link to an access point that maps each SSID to a VLAN (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Unbound: the DNS resolver built into the firewall distributions, which can answer local names and block ads with DNSBL lists (OPNsense) or pfBlockerNG (pfSense) without a separate box (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
UniFi: Ubiquiti's proprietary gateway, switch, access point and camera line under one controller, sold at the hardware price with the controller given away (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Unified memory: a design where CPU and GPU share one large memory pool (DGX Spark, Strix Halo, Apple Silicon), trading discrete-GPU bandwidth for the capacity to load very large models (AI at Home).
Unraid: Lime Technology's proprietary NAS OS, a parity array of independent disks plus Btrfs or ZFS pools, licensed in Starter, Unleashed and Lifetime tiers (NAS & Home Storage).
Unraid Community Applications: the community-maintained plugin catalog of Docker templates and plugins for Unraid (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Unraid license tiers: Starter (a limited number of storage devices), Unleashed (unlimited) and Lifetime; Starter and Unleashed include a year of updates, then an optional paid extension (NAS & Home Storage).
UPnP: a port mapping protocol that lets a device open the firewall without asking, which a homelab turns off (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
UPS: an uninterruptible power supply, which rides out flickers and buys time for a clean shutdown but doesn't carry a lab through a long outage; size it on watts, not volt-amperes (The Homelab).
Uptime Kuma: an MIT-licensed self-hosted monitor for HTTP, ping, DNS and port checks with notifications (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Used enterprise server: a retired data center rack server, cheap to buy and high in capacity and out-of-band management, but loud, deep and expensive in idle power (The Homelab).
Vaultwarden: an AGPL-3.0 volunteer server compatible with the official Bitwarden clients, unofficial and not associated with Bitwarden, kept off tunnels and public exposure (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
vdev: the building block of a ZFS pool, either a mirror (N disks with identical copies, surviving N-1 failures) or a RAIDZ group (NAS & Home Storage).
vfio-pci: the Linux driver a device is bound to by ID for passthrough, so the host doesn't claim it, as an alternative to blacklisting its normal driver (Hypervisors at Home).
vLLM: an Apache 2.0 model server for many GPU and CPU types, using PagedAttention and continuous batching behind an OpenAI-compatible server (AI at Home).
VMware ESXi (free): Broadcom's free vSphere Hypervisor 8, non-production only, with no vCenter, no support and no HA or vMotion, useful only for learning the host (Hypervisors at Home).
VPS relay: exposing a home service through a rented VPS that takes internet traffic and tunnels it home, working behind CGNAT at the cost of another internet-facing box (Exposing Home Services).
Waveform bufferbloat test: a test that grades the latency increase under load over unloaded latency from A+ to F, used to verify SQM (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Whisper: OpenAI's speech-to-text models, with code and weights released under MIT (AI at Home).
WireGuard: a layer 3 secure networking tunnel in mainline Linux, configured as peers of key pairs, and the protocol under Tailscale, Headscale and plain router VPNs (Exposing Home Services).
XCP-ng: the Xen-based hypervisor project backed by Vates, every feature free, managed with Xen Orchestra (Hypervisors at Home).
Xen Orchestra: the management layer for pools of XCP-ng hosts (VM lifecycle, backups, replication and HA), sold as the XOA appliance or built free from source (Hypervisors at Home).
XO Lite: a lightweight Xen Orchestra embedded in an XCP-ng host's own web page (Hypervisors at Home).
Zeal: an offline documentation browser for Windows and Linux using Dash's docsets (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
ZFS replication: sending snapshots between local pools on a schedule so a VM can restart on another node, losing whatever changed since the last run (Hypervisors at Home).
ZIM file: Kiwix's highly compressed archive of web content; Wikipedia ships as maxi (full), nopic (no images) and mini (introductions and infoboxes) (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Zones (OpenWrt): groups of interfaces in OpenWrt's firewall, each with input, output and forward policies, connected by one-way forwardings (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).

5G home internet: fixed-wireless service from a cellular carrier to a home gateway, a common backup line that typically sits behind carrier-grade NAT and is deprioritized under congestion (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
95th percentile billing: a bandwidth commit where the provider samples traffic every five minutes in each direction, discards the top 5% of samples and bills the higher of ingress and egress at the remaining peak (From Homelab to Colocation).
Access port: a switch port facing a device that doesn't speak VLANs, where the switch adds the VLAN tag on ingress and strips it on egress (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
AdGuard Home: a GPL-3.0 DNS sinkhole shipped as one Go binary, with encrypted DNS (DoH, DoT, DNSCrypt) built in, per-client settings and optional DHCP (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
ArchiveBox: an MIT-licensed personal web archive that saves each URL, bookmark or feed item as HTML, a SingleFile copy, PDF, screenshot, WARC and media, so a cited page outlives its site (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Array (Unraid): Unraid's original storage design, where each data disk keeps its own filesystem and one or two parity disks hold real-time parity across all of them, so mixed disk sizes can join and a read spins up one disk (NAS & Home Storage).
ashift: the ZFS setting for a device's sector alignment, ashift=12 for 4K-sector disks, fixed when the device first joins a pool and never changeable afterward (NAS & Home Storage).
ASN (from ARIN): an autonomous system number, which ARIN issues singly to any organization on request, the first step to announcing addresses of one's own over BGP (From Homelab to Colocation).
AT&T IP Passthrough: the mode AT&T fiber gateways use instead of a full bridge, handing the gateway's WAN address to one device, which loses the gateway's firewall and so must be a real firewall (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
awesome-selfhosted: the reference catalog of Free Software network services and web applications that can be hosted on one's own servers, with non-free software kept on a separate page (The Homelab).
AWQ: a 4-bit, weight-only quantization method that protects the weights that matter most to activations, run by vLLM and Transformers (AI at Home).
Backup class: the homelab's grouping of data (critical, standard, VMs, none) that sets each class's local copy, second machine, offsite copy, retention and restore-test schedule (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Backup line: a low-rate or low-cap internet line kept only for failover, such as a satellite standby plan or a cellular backup, typically behind carrier-grade NAT (From Homelab to Colocation).
Blended transit: retail colocation bandwidth bought by the provider from several carriers and routed over them, so one carrier's outage is the provider's problem, as opposed to single-carrier transit (From Homelab to Colocation).
BorgBackup: a BSD-3-Clause deduplicating, encrypting file-level backup program that stores to any remote host reachable over SSH (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
bpg/proxmox: the maintained MPL-2.0 Terraform and OpenTofu provider for Proxmox VE, authenticating with an API token and needing SSH to the nodes only for a few operations (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Bridge mode: an ISP gateway setting (Xfinity's Bridge Mode, for example) that turns off the gateway's router and private Wi-Fi and keeps only the modem, so one router of the owner's owns NAT, firewall and the queue (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Bufferbloat: latency that climbs under load because a queue forms in the modem or the ISP's equipment, fixed with smart queue management on the home router and measured as latency under load (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Cable schedule: a record of every network cable run, labeled at both ends, with its tested result (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
cake: the CAKE queueing discipline used for SQM on OpenWrt (with piece_of_cake.qos), with cake-autorate adjusting its rate from measured latency on variable links such as LTE, 5G and Starlink (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT): an ISP's own NAT in front of customer links numbered from 100.64.0.0/10 (RFC 6598), which stops inbound connections reaching the home whatever the router does (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Cat 5e: the cable category rated to 100 MHz that runs gigabit at 100 m and, under 802.3bz, 2.5G and in most cases 5G over the installed base, which makes existing runs worth keeping (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Cat 6: the cable category rated to 250 MHz that carries 5G to 100 m but 10GBASE-T only over shorter runs, depending on alien crosstalk (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Cat 6A: the cable category rated to 500 MHz and the only one rated for 10GBASE-T at the full 100 m, so the default for new runs (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Cat 8: a shielded-only category for short top-of-rack and end-of-row server links with at most two connectors, not a better house cable (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Channel model (TIA-568): the cabling rule of a 90 m permanent link of solid cable plus up to 10 m of patch cords, 100 m in all, with stranded cable reserved for cords (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Cloudflare Access: Cloudflare's identity check in front of a tunnel's public hostname, where every Access application is deny by default and an Allow policy names the people let in (Exposing Home Services).
Cloudflare Tunnel: an outbound connection from cloudflared at home to Cloudflare that publishes services without an open inbound port, at the cost that Cloudflare terminates TLS, sees the plaintext and can suspend the hostname under its terms (Exposing Home Services).
community.proxmox: the Ansible collection that manages Proxmox VMs, instances, storage, firewalls and backups, offers a proxmox inventory plugin and reaches into LXC containers through pct over SSH (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Connector (cloudflared): each running cloudflared process on a Cloudflare Tunnel; several connectors on one tunnel act as replicas, each sending traffic to the nearest Cloudflare data center (Exposing Home Services).
Consumer mesh: app-managed home Wi-Fi systems (eero, TP-Link Deco, Netgear Orbi, ASUS) whose nodes link over wireless backhaul, with feature sets that vary by model and sometimes depend on a subscription (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Copper-clad aluminum (CCA): network cable with aluminum conductors coated in copper, which fails the NEC and UL requirement for copper conductors in communications cable and should never be installed (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Corosync: the Proxmox VE cluster stack, which needs low, steady latency between nodes rather than bandwidth, ideally on a dedicated link, because storage or backup traffic on the same link can break quorum (Hypervisors at Home).
Data caps: monthly transfer limits on residential internet plans, fading on new plans but still applied to some legacy ones with overage charges (From Homelab to Colocation).
Dataset (ZFS): a filesystem inside a ZFS pool with its own properties (compression, record size, quota, encryption) and its own snapshots, ideally one per app so snapshots and restores are per app (NAS & Home Storage).
DERP: Tailscale's relay servers, used as the last resort when hard NAT or firewalls prevent a direct path; relayed traffic stays end-to-end encrypted and a DERP server can't decrypt it (Exposing Home Services).
DevDocs: an MPL-2.0 documentation browser with an offline mode that downloads documentation sets into the browser, also published as a self-hosted image (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
DGX Spark: NVIDIA's small unified-memory AI machine with 128 GB of LPDDR5X, high in capacity but low in bandwidth next to a discrete GPU, suited to large mixture-of-experts models; several units can be clustered (AI at Home).
Distribution (registry): the CNCF project that was Docker Registry, the minimal choice for a LAN container registry so images built at home are not pulled across the uplink on every deploy (From Homelab to Colocation).
DIY tower: a self-assembled server from consumer parts, often with an iGPU and an HBA for more drives, with IPMI only on server-class boards, typically used as NAS plus apps plus transcoding (The Homelab).
Docker Compose: the Apache-2.0 Docker CLI plugin (docker compose) that runs multi-container apps from YAML, the portable, diffable app runtime for a homelab when kept in Git (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
DOCSIS: the cable internet standard, where DOCSIS 3.1 modems offer far more download than upload and DOCSIS 4.0 raises upstream through Full Duplex or Extended Spectrum DOCSIS; deployed plans offer far less than the specification (From Homelab to Colocation).
DuckDNS: a free, donation-funded dynamic DNS service whose client calls an update URL with a token; it uses the caller's address but cannot detect IPv6, which has to be passed explicitly (Exposing Home Services).
Dynamic DNS (DDNS): a service that updates a hostname whenever a residential IPv4 address changes, the name half of a port forward (Exposing Home Services).
eero Internet Backup: eero's failover to a phone hotspot or another Wi-Fi network, offered to eero Plus subscribers and select ISP customers rather than every owner (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Emby: a media server, proprietary since version 4, that sells features through its Emby Premiere subscription (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
EXL2 / EXL3: ExLlama's quantization formats, mixing precision per layer to hit any average bits per weight between 2 and 8 (AI at Home).
ExLlamaV2 / ExLlamaV3: MIT-licensed NVIDIA CUDA runtimes built for fast single-user inference on consumer cards; V3 adds tensor and expert parallelism across GPUs, and V2 is archived in favor of V3 (AI at Home).
Exposure class: the homelab inventory field (none, lan, proxy-allowlist, public) recording how each service is reached, who authenticates it and how fast it is patched (Exposing Home Services).
Flent: an on-demand network load-testing tool whose RRUL test measures latency while saturating the line, used with IRTT for precise round-trip times (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
FLUX.1: a 12B image model family whose [dev] weights are non-commercial (outputs usable commercially) and whose [schnell] variant is Apache 2.0 (AI at Home).
Forwardings (OpenWrt): OpenWrt firewall entries that permit traffic from one zone to another in one direction only (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
FP8: an 8-bit floating-point format (E4M3, E5M2) for Hopper and newer GPUs and RTX 40 and 50 cards, which large evaluations found effectively lossless across model scales (AI at Home).
Funnel (Tailscale): the exception to Tailscale's private-only model, routing public internet traffic to a tailnet device on a few fixed ports under non-configurable bandwidth limits, in beta (Exposing Home Services).
Gateway group: the pfSense and OPNsense dual-WAN construct that groups WAN gateways into tiers, where gateways on one tier load-balance and gateways on different tiers fail over, selected by a LAN rule (From Homelab to Colocation).
GGUF K-quants and I-quants: llama.cpp's quantization formats from about 2 to 8.5 bits per weight, run by every llama.cpp backend, Ollama and LM Studio, with an importance matrix from calibration text reducing loss (AI at Home).
Gitea Actions: Gitea's built-in CI with GitHub-style workflow syntax and act_runner as its agent, so a forge and its CI can both live on the LAN (From Homelab to Colocation).
gpt-oss: OpenAI's Apache 2.0 open-weight mixture-of-experts models, shipped in MXFP4, whose half-windowed attention layers cut memory, so the larger runs on a single 80 GB GPU (AI at Home).
GPTQ: a second-order post-training quantization method at 3 to 4 bits, weight-only, run by vLLM and Transformers (AI at Home).
Grants (Tailscale): the entries in a tailnet policy file that say which sources may reach which destinations and ports, alongside groups, tagOwners and tests that fail a change breaking an expected path (Exposing Home Services).
Grouped-query attention: a model design where many query heads share a few key-value heads, which is what makes the KV cache affordable at long context (AI at Home).
Harvester: SUSE's open-source hypervisor built on Kubernetes with KubeVirt and Longhorn, running VMs through Kubernetes (Hypervisors at Home).
Headscale: a self-hosted control plane for Tailscale clients, giving the same traffic path as Tailscale while the owner runs and patches the control plane (Exposing Home Services).
Home Assistant: the Apache-2.0 home automation platform funded by Nabu Casa's subscribers, installed either as Home Assistant OS, the recommended embedded operating system, or as Home Assistant Container, where the owner handles updates and apps are unsupported (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
home.arpa: the domain reserved by RFC 8375 for names that exist only inside a house, used instead of an invented TLD that leaks to the root (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Hybrid Mesh Backup (TP-Link Deco): Deco's failover in which a 4G/5G Deco with an active SIM backs up the whole network and switches back automatically when the main line returns (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Hyper-V: Microsoft's hypervisor, a feature of Windows Pro and Enterprise and Windows Server; the free standalone Hyper-V Server ended with its 2019 release (Hypervisors at Home).
Immich: an AGPL-3.0 self-hosted photo and video service, shipped as a Compose stack, whose core team is employed by FUTO and which sells an optional key while promising never to paywall features (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Incus: the community-led fork of LXD from the Linux Containers project, managing system containers and VMs with LXC and QEMU under Apache-2.0 (Hypervisors at Home).
Ingress rules (cloudflared): the ordered list in a locally managed tunnel's config.yml mapping hostname and optional path to a local service, which must end with a catch-all rule (Exposing Home Services).
Inter-VLAN rules: the firewall rules between home segments, default deny with exceptions only for the flows a household actually uses, without which segmentation means nothing (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Internet-in-a-Box: an installable bundle of the offline internet: Kiwix, OER2Go and Archive.org content packs, learning videos and education apps such as Kolibri, Moodle and Nextcloud (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
IOMMU: the CPU and board feature (Intel VT-d or AMD-Vi), enabled in firmware, that PCIe passthrough requires to give a VM direct control of a device (Hypervisors at Home).
IOMMU groups: the units in which the IOMMU isolates devices; only a whole group can be passed through, and grouping depends on the board's PCIe layout and ACS support, so it is checked before buying a board (Hypervisors at Home).
IPv6 prefix delegation: the RFC 7084 behavior where a home router requests a prefix from the ISP with DHCPv6 (IA_PD), sized for a /64 on each of its interfaces (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
ISP-supplied gateway: the ISP's combined modem, router and Wi-Fi box, whose firmware, queueing and Wi-Fi placement stay under the ISP's control, which is why bridge mode or IP Passthrough matters (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Jellyfin: a GPL-2.0 volunteer media server with no premium licenses or features, trading paywalls for volunteer capacity (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Kiwix: a nonprofit that packages websites such as Wikipedia as ZIM files, highly compressed archives readable in its apps or served on a network by kiwix-serve (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
kiwix-serve: Kiwix's GPLv3 HTTP daemon that serves ZIM files on a network, also shipped as a container image (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Kokoro-82M: an Apache 2.0 text-to-speech model with 82M parameters (AI at Home).
KV cache: the key and value vectors a model stores per layer for every token in context, sized at 2 x layers x KV heads x head dimension x bytes per element per token, the hidden variable in memory sizing (AI at Home).
KVM with libvirt: the Linux kernel hypervisor managed through libvirt on any Linux host, the base that won the home tier (Hypervisors at Home).
LibreNMS: an SNMP monitoring system for switches, access points and router interfaces (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
llama.cpp: the MIT-licensed GGUF runtime for CPU, CUDA, Metal, Vulkan, ROCm and SYCL, whose llama-server offers partial GPU offload and an OpenAI-compatible API (AI at Home).
LM Studio: a desktop app for running GGUF and, on Apple Silicon, MLX models, free for work use, with a headless daemon and OpenAI-style endpoints (AI at Home).
Local zones (Unbound): Unbound's local DNS records, where a static zone answers only from local data and returns NXDOMAIN for anything else, and a redirect zone answers every name under it with one record (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
LXC: Linux system containers, as run in Proxmox VE, that share the host kernel, are unprivileged by default, start in seconds and suit a single Linux service; a VM is needed for another kernel (Hypervisors at Home).
LXD: the Linux Containers project's manager for system containers and VMs until Canonical took it in house, which led to the Incus fork (Hypervisors at Home).
mergerfs: a FUSE union filesystem that presents many disks' paths as one mount with policies for where new files go, explicitly without redundancy, usually paired with SnapRAID (NAS & Home Storage).
Mesh (Wi-Fi): access points linked to each other over radio, where every wireless hop spends airtime twice, which is why wired backhaul beats it (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Mini PC: low-power x86 boxes and 1-liter business desktops (N100 boxes, HP Elite Mini, Lenovo Tiny, Dell Micro), quiet and cheap to run but limited in memory and drives, the default for always-on services (The Homelab).
Minimum routable prefix: the smallest block the internet will carry, a /24 of IPv4 or a /48 of IPv6, because smaller subnets are filtered (From Homelab to Colocation).
MLX: Apple's MIT-licensed array framework for Apple Silicon's unified memory, whose mlx-lm runs language models and whose models LM Studio can serve (AI at Home).
MoCA: Ethernet over existing coax, which turns a cable TV outlet into wired backhaul for an access point (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Modified MIT License: a model license label used by some open-weight releases that adds conditions to MIT, ranging from a name display requirement to barring large companies outright, so the license file must be read, not the tag (AI at Home).
Mover (Unraid): the Unraid job that migrates files from a fast pool to the array on a schedule, according to each share's primary and secondary locations (NAS & Home Storage).
MXFP4: the OCP microscaling 4-bit format (E2M1 with one power-of-two scale per 32 values) that gpt-oss ships in, accelerated on Blackwell (AI at Home).
NAS appliance: a storage box from Synology, QNAP, TerraMaster or UGREEN that hides its operating system behind a vendor web UI, low-effort storage subject to the vendor's drive policy and OS lifecycle (The Homelab).
Network UPS Tools (NUT): GPL software that supports UPSes and power devices through one protocol; upsd serves a UPS's state and upsmon on each host shuts secondaries down first and the attached primary last (The Homelab).
Nextcloud: an AGPL-3.0 platform for file sync, sharing, office and calendars, with a paid Enterprise edition per user (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Nginx Proxy Manager: nginx with a web UI in a Docker image, with proxy hosts and built-in Let's Encrypt, whose configuration lives in its database rather than in Git (Exposing Home Services).
No-IP: a dynamic DNS provider whose free plan gives one hostname on its own domains, with custom domains on a paid plan (Exposing Home Services).
NVFP4: NVIDIA's 4-bit format (E2M1 with an FP8 scale per 16 values, about 4.5 bits) for Blackwell Tensor Cores, including RTX 50 cards (AI at Home).
Ollama: an MIT-licensed model server that manages loading and unloading GGUF models from its own registry, with a native API and an OpenAI-compatible /v1, sizing its default context by VRAM (AI at Home).
Open WebUI: the common front end for local models, with chats, knowledge bases, web search, speech, image generation, Python tools and MCP, against Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible API (AI at Home).
OpenWrt: open-source replacement firmware for consumer routers on Linux and nftables (fw4), whose firewall groups interfaces into zones with forwardings between them (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
OpenZFS: the CDDL-licensed ZFS project, run on a general OS such as Debian, Proxmox VE or FreeBSD, free but with all management by hand and the module out of tree (NAS & Home Storage).
OPNsense: a BSD 2-clause router and firewall distribution on FreeBSD's pf, forked from pfSense, with Unbound blocklists and WireGuard built in (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Optic coding: vendor fields in a transceiver's EEPROM that some enterprise switches read to refuse optics they don't recognize, the source of SFP lock-in (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Organic Maps: an Apache 2.0 phone map app built on OpenStreetMap data that supports every feature without an internet connection (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
OsmAnd: a phone map app with fully offline maps of any region and offline navigation, built on OpenStreetMap data (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Parity array versus pool: the main split in home storage: independent disks with parity beside them grow one disk at a time and lose only failed disks, while striped pools are faster and checksummed but grow in fixed shapes (NAS & Home Storage).
Path diversity: using backup links of a different type over different cable paths, because links from the same provider tend to fail together (From Homelab to Colocation).
Peer (WireGuard): a key pair and a list of Allowed IPs, with no session negotiation and nothing that answers an unauthenticated packet; keys are distributed by hand (Exposing Home Services).
pfSense CE: Netgate's free Apache-2.0 router and firewall distribution on FreeBSD's pf, descended from m0n0wall, with most development effort now going to pfSense Plus (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
pfSense Plus: Netgate's proprietary productized build of pfSense, included on Netgate appliances and sold per instance elsewhere (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Pi-hole: an open-source DNS sinkhole on dnsmasq (FTL) that blocks ads and trackers for the house, with optional DHCP; run as a pair, because a single resolver is the classic outage (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Plex Media Server: a proprietary media server with polished clients on almost every TV and console, which charges remote viewers through Plex Pass and a Remote Watch Pass (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
PMTiles: Protomaps' single-file archive format for tiled map data, read by clients with HTTP range requests so a static file server serves a map with no tile server (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
PoE budget: the total class power a switch must supply, summed from each access point's and camera's PoE class rather than its typical draw (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Pool (Unraid): Btrfs or ZFS storage beside the Unraid array for cache, VMs and containers, recommended for all-flash servers (NAS & Home Storage).
Pool (ZFS): ZFS's combined volume manager and filesystem, built from vdevs that writes stripe across, so losing any vdev loses the pool (NAS & Home Storage).
Port forward plus DDNS: the inbound method of exposing a home service, sending internet traffic straight to the home's public IP, reachable by anyone and unusable behind CGNAT (Exposing Home Services).
Portainer: a container management UI shipped as a container image, with a Zlib Community Edition and a paid Business Edition (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Powerline: adapters (HomePlug AV2, G.hn) that carry Ethernet over electrical wiring, the last resort before mesh, with throughput that depends on the circuit (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Prometheus blackbox_exporter: an Apache-2.0 exporter that turns ICMP, HTTP, DNS and TCP probes into metrics for Grafana and alerting (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Prosumer, controller-managed networking: UniFi, OpenWrt or a pfSense or OPNsense box with standalone access points, giving VLANs, SQM, multi-WAN, per-port PoE and monitoring, where the owner's configuration is the risk (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Proxmox Backup Server (PBS): Proxmox's AGPLv3 backup server, written in Rust, that takes incremental, server-deduplicated, client-encrypted backups of VMs, containers and hosts and syncs to a remote PBS (Hypervisors at Home).
Proxmox Datacenter Manager: an AGPLv3 single view across several Proxmox VE clusters, nodes and PBS instances, with cross-cluster live migration, which a one-cluster homelab doesn't need (Hypervisors at Home).
Proxmox VE: the Debian-based hypervisor with KVM/QEMU and LXC, every feature free and a subscription buying only the enterprise update repository and support, the homelab default (Hypervisors at Home).
Proxmox VE repositories: the update channels (pve-enterprise for subscribers, and the free no-subscription repository that receives updates first), which are what a subscription sells instead of features (Hypervisors at Home).
QAT checkpoint: a model checkpoint trained for low precision (quantization-aware training), usually 4-bit, instead of rounded after training (AI at Home).
QDevice: an external third vote for a two-node Proxmox cluster, corosync-qnetd on an independent machine with corosync-qdevice on each node, discouraged on clusters with an odd node count (Hypervisors at Home).
QTS: QNAP's NAS operating system on ext4 over classic RAID (NAS & Home Storage).
Quorum (cluster): the vote count a cluster needs to change configuration; high availability needs at least three votes, from three nodes or two plus a QDevice, and a node out of quorum refuses changes (Hypervisors at Home).
QuTS hero: QNAP's ZFS-based NAS operating system with self-healing, inline deduplication and compression, and triple-parity and triple-mirror layouts (NAS & Home Storage).
r/homelab: the Reddit community about home hardware, racks, networking and the lab itself, one of the hobby's two public squares (The Homelab).
r/selfhosted: the Reddit community about the software people run on their own hardware (The Homelab).
RAIDZ: a ZFS vdev with single, double or triple parity (RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3) tolerating one, two or three device failures, the alternative to a mirror (NAS & Home Storage).
RAIDZ expansion: the OpenZFS feature (zpool attach to a RAIDZ vdev) that widens an existing RAIDZ vdev by one disk, where before a home user had to add a whole vdev or replace every disk (NAS & Home Storage).
Repatriation in miniature: the homelab as a swap of metered rent for a fixed cost of hardware, electricity and the owner's hours, the same calculation companies make leaving the cloud (The Homelab).
Residential cable or fiber: home internet sold in download-weighted speed tiers with dynamic public IPv4 and an AUP that limits use to personal, non-commercial purposes, unlike business plans with static blocks (From Homelab to Colocation).
restic: a BSD-2-Clause deduplicating, encrypting file-level backup program that writes to local disks, SFTP, its REST server, S3-compatible storage and other clouds (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Ride-through: keeping a lab running through a long power outage, which takes a home battery or generator; a UPS only buys a clean shutdown (From Homelab to Colocation).
Sanoid and syncoid: a GPL-3.0 policy-driven ZFS snapshot manager and its companion that replicates datasets over SSH with incremental zfs send (NAS & Home Storage).
Scrub (ZFS): a scheduled read of every block in a pool that finds and repairs silent corruption from redundancy before a second failure makes it unrecoverable (NAS & Home Storage).
SGLang: an Apache 2.0 GPU model server with the RadixAttention prefix cache and structured generation behind an OpenAI-compatible API (AI at Home).
Smart queue management (SQM): shaping traffic slightly below the ISP's rate so the queue forms in the home router, where a fair-queueing AQM such as CAKE or FQ_CoDel manages it, the fix for bufferbloat (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
SMART self-test: a drive's own short or long self-test; rising reallocated or pending sectors or a failed test mean ordering or fitting a replacement (NAS & Home Storage).
SmokePing: a tool that graphs latency and loss distribution over time to many targets, the classic "smoke" graph (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
SnapRAID: GPL-3.0 parity computed only on request (snapraid sync) over disks that each keep an ordinary filesystem, with scrubs against checksums; new files stay unprotected until the next sync (NAS & Home Storage).
Snapshot (ZFS): an instant copy-on-write point-in-time view of a dataset, which zfs send turns into a stream, whole or incremental, that another pool can receive (NAS & Home Storage).
Special, log and cache vdevs: ZFS support devices that change performance, not redundancy: a special vdev holds metadata (and is part of the pool, so needs full redundancy), a log device absorbs synchronous writes, and a cache device is a second-level read cache (NAS & Home Storage).
Stable Diffusion: Stability AI's image model family, whose licenses run from CreativeML OpenRAIL-M on 1.x to the Stability AI Community License on 3.5, which ends above a revenue threshold (AI at Home).
Starlink Standby Mode: a low-cost Starlink plan with unlimited data at a low speed, kept as a backup line, which may not reactivate to a full plan in a congested cell (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Strix Halo: AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ unified-memory platform, letting much of its memory serve as graphics memory for large models at a fraction of a discrete GPU's bandwidth (AI at Home).
Subnet router (Tailscale): a tailnet node that advertises a LAN prefix, putting a whole VLAN on the tailnet without a client on each device (Exposing Home Services).
Synology drive policy: Synology's policy on its 2025 Plus models that drives not Synology-branded or certified lost storage pool creation, health monitoring and firmware updates, the risk of a vendor selling the whole box (NAS & Home Storage).
Synology DSM: Synology's proprietary NAS operating system, Btrfs volumes on Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) or classic RAID, sold with the hardware (NAS & Home Storage).
Tailscale: a WireGuard overlay with a hosted control plane that distributes keys and handles NAT traversal so devices connect directly, falling back to DERP relays, reachable only by tailnet members (Exposing Home Services).
Telmate/proxmox: the older MIT-licensed Terraform provider for Proxmox that provisions QEMU VMs and LXC containers, with known limitations listed in its README (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
tileserver-gl: a server that serves vector tiles from MBTiles files to MapLibre GL JS, Leaflet and OpenLayers, with optional server-side raster rendering (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Traefik: a reverse proxy that reads routes from Docker labels; its Docker provider routes every container by default unless exposedByDefault is set to false (Exposing Home Services).
TrueNAS CORE: iXsystems' open-source ZFS NAS on FreeBSD, the renamed FreeNAS, now at its final release (NAS & Home Storage).
TrueNAS SCALE (Community Edition): iXsystems' ZFS NAS on Debian Linux with Linux containers and KVM, now TrueNAS Community Edition, whose apps moved from Kubernetes (k3s) to Docker (NAS & Home Storage).
Trunk port: a switch link carrying several tagged VLANs, such as the firewall-to-switch link or the link to an access point that maps each SSID to a VLAN (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Unbound: the DNS resolver built into the firewall distributions, which can answer local names and block ads with DNSBL lists (OPNsense) or pfBlockerNG (pfSense) without a separate box (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
UniFi: Ubiquiti's proprietary gateway, switch, access point and camera line under one controller, sold at the hardware price with the controller given away (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
Unified memory: a design where CPU and GPU share one large memory pool (DGX Spark, Strix Halo, Apple Silicon), trading discrete-GPU bandwidth for the capacity to load very large models (AI at Home).
Unraid: Lime Technology's proprietary NAS OS, a parity array of independent disks plus Btrfs or ZFS pools, licensed in Starter, Unleashed and Lifetime tiers (NAS & Home Storage).
Unraid Community Applications: the community-maintained plugin catalog of Docker templates and plugins for Unraid (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Unraid license tiers: Starter (a limited number of storage devices), Unleashed (unlimited) and Lifetime; Starter and Unleashed include a year of updates, then an optional paid extension (NAS & Home Storage).
UPnP: a port mapping protocol that lets a device open the firewall without asking, which a homelab turns off (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).
UPS: an uninterruptible power supply, which rides out flickers and buys time for a clean shutdown but doesn't carry a lab through a long outage; size it on watts, not volt-amperes (The Homelab).
Uptime Kuma: an MIT-licensed self-hosted monitor for HTTP, ping, DNS and port checks with notifications (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Used enterprise server: a retired data center rack server, cheap to buy and high in capacity and out-of-band management, but loud, deep and expensive in idle power (The Homelab).
Vaultwarden: an AGPL-3.0 volunteer server compatible with the official Bitwarden clients, unofficial and not associated with Bitwarden, kept off tunnels and public exposure (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
vdev: the building block of a ZFS pool, either a mirror (N disks with identical copies, surviving N-1 failures) or a RAIDZ group (NAS & Home Storage).
vfio-pci: the Linux driver a device is bound to by ID for passthrough, so the host doesn't claim it, as an alternative to blacklisting its normal driver (Hypervisors at Home).
vLLM: an Apache 2.0 model server for many GPU and CPU types, using PagedAttention and continuous batching behind an OpenAI-compatible server (AI at Home).
VMware ESXi (free): Broadcom's free vSphere Hypervisor 8, non-production only, with no vCenter, no support and no HA or vMotion, useful only for learning the host (Hypervisors at Home).
VPS relay: exposing a home service through a rented VPS that takes internet traffic and tunnels it home, working behind CGNAT at the cost of another internet-facing box (Exposing Home Services).
Waveform bufferbloat test: a test that grades the latency increase under load over unloaded latency from A+ to F, used to verify SQM (Home Networks: Ethernet, Wi-Fi & Cabling).
Whisper: OpenAI's speech-to-text models, with code and weights released under MIT (AI at Home).
WireGuard: a layer 3 secure networking tunnel in mainline Linux, configured as peers of key pairs, and the protocol under Tailscale, Headscale and plain router VPNs (Exposing Home Services).
XCP-ng: the Xen-based hypervisor project backed by Vates, every feature free, managed with Xen Orchestra (Hypervisors at Home).
Xen Orchestra: the management layer for pools of XCP-ng hosts (VM lifecycle, backups, replication and HA), sold as the XOA appliance or built free from source (Hypervisors at Home).
XO Lite: a lightweight Xen Orchestra embedded in an XCP-ng host's own web page (Hypervisors at Home).
Zeal: an offline documentation browser for Windows and Linux using Dash's docsets (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
ZFS replication: sending snapshots between local pools on a schedule so a VM can restart on another node, losing whatever changed since the last run (Hypervisors at Home).
ZIM file: Kiwix's highly compressed archive of web content; Wikipedia ships as maxi (full), nopic (no images) and mini (introductions and infoboxes) (Self-Hosted Apps & Orchestration).
Zones (OpenWrt): groups of interfaces in OpenWrt's firewall, each with input, output and forward policies, connected by one-way forwardings (Home Routing, Firewalls & DNS).