Mac Mini M2 Homelab
- Docker
- Jellyfin
- Pi-hole
- n8n
- Tailscale
- Ollama
- OrbStack
A Mac Mini M2 I picked up off Carousell, running a Docker stack for media (Jellyfin, the *arr stack) and home ops (n8n, Pi-hole). Tailscale handles remote access. Mostly an excuse to keep learning ops outside work.
Scored a Mac Mini M2 on Carousell after a week of negotiating, the seller had it listed at a price that didn't reflect the market, and patience closed the gap. It now runs as my homelab server, managed through OrbStack for container orchestration.
The Docker stack covers media (Jellyfin + the *arr suite via YAMS for automated content management), network-level ad blocking (Pi-hole), and workflow automation (n8n). Tailscale ties everything together for remote access without opening ports. Ollama runs local LLM experiments, nothing production-grade, but useful for offline inference testing.
It's modest hardware doing real work: serving media to the household, blocking ads at the DNS level, and giving me a sandbox for containerized deployments. The whole setup taught me more about networking, Docker Compose, and self-hosting than any tutorial could.