What Is a Homelab 🏡

A homelab is a personal computing environment, often set up by tech enthusiasts, students, developers, or system administrators for experimentation, self-hosting services, or learning purposes.

Common services deployed in a homelab include:

• Self-hosted web servers
• Media servers like Plex or Jellyfin
• NAS (Network-Attached Storage)
• Game servers
• DNS servers (e.g., Pi-hole, AdGuard Home)
• Web applications, dashboards, and APIs

Homelabs are increasingly popular because they offer learning-by-doing experiences in networking, virtualization (e.g., Proxmox, VMware), Linux administration, and container orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).

What Network Risks Does a Homelab Face

When a homelab is exposed to the internet, it becomes a target for the same cybersecurity threats that enterprise systems face:

Common Risks:

• Bot scanning & brute-force attacks
• Exploitation of vulnerable web apps
• DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service)
• Path traversal, XSS, SQL injection attacks
• Unauthorized API access
• Information leakage

Potential Consequences:

• Service downtime or instability
• Data breaches (e.g., exposed personal files, credentials)
• Your IP or machine being added to blacklists
• Your network being used as a botnet node

Why Homelabs Need a WAF

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) acts as a shield between your applications and incoming traffic. It inspects HTTP requests and blocks malicious traffic before it reaches your services.

For homelabs, a good WAF should be:

• Lightweight and self-hostable
• Easy to deploy and configure
• Effective at blocking bots and common exploits
• Transparent and controllable

SafeLine WAF: A Perfect Match for Homelabs

SafeLine is a powerful free or affordable WAF developed by Chaitin Tech. It's widely used in production and now gaining traction in the homelab and self-hosting community for good reason.

Why SafeLine Is Great for Homelabs

• Free and Open Source: No licensing costs, ideal for personal projects.
• Self-Hosted: No cloud dependencies, runs locally on Docker.
• Rule-Based Engine: Custom rules allow fine-grained control over traffic.
• Bot Management: Blocks malicious bots, scanners, and brute-force tools.
• Security Logs & Attack Details: Easily trace and analyze attempted attacks.
• Lightweight & Fast: Designed to be efficient on low-resource machines.

Real Homelab Use Cases for SafeLine

• Protecting a public-facing Nextcloud or Vaultwarden instance
• Shielding self-hosted APIs and web dashboards
• Filtering traffic to a reverse proxy (e.g., Nginx or Traefik)
• Blocking unwanted geographies or IP ranges
• Inspecting requests for custom microservices

Getting Started

You can deploy SafeLine in minutes by executing the command:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSLk https://waf.chaitin.com/release/latest/manager.sh)" -- --en

Then access the SafeLine dashboard on port 9443 and start configuring security rules for your homelab.

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Join the Community

SafeLine has a growing Discord community with real homelab users sharing configs, troubleshooting advice, and improvements: https://discord.gg/dy3JT7dkmY

Protect your homelab like a pro.
SafeLine gives you enterprise-grade defense, tailored for your home lab setup.

Other resources:
SafeLine Website: https://ly.safepoint.cloud/ShZAy9x
Live Demo: https://demo.waf.chaitin.com:9443/statistics
Doc: https://docs.waf.chaitin.com/en/home