3 useful homelab maintenance projects worth tackling (July 24 - 26)

Published Jul 23, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT Patrick Campanale has been in the tech space for well over a decade, specializing in PC/gaming news and reviews, as well as maker-focused products to build small businesses. With a start in technology back in 2010 surrounding the Palm/webOS ecosystem, Patrick spent his formative years developing mobile applications as well as blogging for various publications, eventually leading to starting his own website in 2014. After running a technology blog for a few years, he stepped out of that role and into the world of high-end custom PC manufacturing and building, with a focus on YouTube video production and overclocking. Then, six years ago, Patrick joined the 9to5Toys team as an editor/writer/reviewer with over 14,000 articles being published there there, ranging from deals and roundups to in-depth reviews on the latest technology, video games, 3D printers, and more. In his free time, Patrick loves to create projects from wood using various robots and methods, including leveraging the technologies of CNCs and lasers. If Patrick isn't working on a computer or playing video games, he's likely in his 2-car garage workshop creating something unique. In addition to all this, Patrick is also a youth pastor at his local church where he feels God has called him to serve, and he loves every minute of it. Are you ready for another batch of fun (and useful) homelab projects to try out this weekend? From building your own speed test server to some media server maintenance, here are three projects for you to finish before Monday rolls around. Build your own speed test server with OpenSpeedTest Test both LAN and WAN speeds with ease Credit: Nick Lewis / How-To Geek If you've ever wondered what the network speed between devices on your LAN is, or how fast your connection is from outside of your home network, then OpenSpeedTest is for you. OpenSpeedTest is a simple-to-run Docker container that lets you run a speed test on your own hardware. Think Ookla's SpeedTest.net platform, but hosted on your own server. Why is that something you should have in your homelab? I've actually used OpenSpeedTest quite a few times to run various tests. Sometimes your device might report that it has one type of connection on your network, but you doubt it's actually true. For instance, I have seen my phone report that it has a multi-gig Wi-Fi connection to my Wi-Fi 7 router. While this might be theoretically true, how true is it on the bandwidth side of things? Since my NAS is connected to my router over 2.5GbE, I can achieve up to 2.5Gb/s of throughput over Wi-Fi to my NAS. So, with OpenSpeedTest, I'm able to run a quick test to see just how fast it is. I've also used this to see how fast outside connections to my house are. I run a lot of self-hosted services, from media servers to websites, and fast networking is crucial. So, with OpenSpeedTest running behind a reverse proxy, I can let someone outside of my network test their speed to my server. This is actually really useful diagnostic information if someone is complaining about a slow connection to your server. You might have a lightning-fast connection from down the road, but how about someone who is several hundred or thousands of miles away? Letting them speed test to your hardware, and not just a generic speed test server, offers diagnostic information not really available any other way. Never watch a TV show intro again with this Jellyfin plugin Binge watching has never been so easy Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek Out of all the features (besides transcoding and remote streaming) that Plex Pass offers, skipping intros has to be my favorite. Jellyfin, sadly, doesn't have such a feature built-in at all. However, a simple plugin actually adds intro skipping functionality without having to spend a dime. Intro Skipper is the plugin you're after here. What it does is analyze local media in your Jellyfin library and then generates timestamps for introductions, credits, recaps, previews, and other similar segments. It uses audio fingerprints to compare episode to episode to figure out where the recurring audio is and makes the marks that way. Once the plugin has all of the marks made, then it will present a button to skip whatever portion of the show it has detected. It's pretty simple and straightforward. This weekend is the perfect time to stop watching TV show intros on your Jellyfin server. It won't take long to install, but how long it takes to scan definitely varies by how fast your system is, so the sooner you deploy it, the better. Get rid of unwatched Plex or Jellyfin media with Maintainerr Keep your media server lean and bloat-free Have you ever wanted a way to automatically clean up your Plex or Jellyfin library based on how frequently or recently something was watched? Maybe you want to automatically delete TV shows that haven't been watched in the last 12 months. Or, you might want to delete a TV show after the entire series has been watched. Whatever you want to do, Maintainerr is there for you. It's designed to automate media library cleanups for Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby. You build your own rules for how it cleans up media. You can program it based on things like watch history, age, metadata, matching titles, requests, and more. Maintainerr can also integrate with the other arr apps, like Sonarr and Radarr to mark things as unmonitored, change quality profiles, or even clear requests through Seerr. For watch history and age, it can grab that information from platforms like Tautulli, which gives you additional rules and actions to choose from. It'll probably take you a good portion of the weekend to get Maintainerr deployed, configured, and running. It's not as simple as deploy and go. You'll have to spend time building the rules to be exactly how you want them to be, make sure that things are configured right, and that it doesn't destroy your entire library because you clicked the wrong button. Maintainerr does recommend a 30-day delay while testing, essentially having it mark things for deletion but not actually deleting them for 30 days so you can make sure it's working properly. Also, there's no built-in authentication, so make sure the web interface is local-only; otherwise your entire media library could just up and disappear. Maintainerr is definitely a more advanced homelabbing project, there's no doubt about that. But, when properly configured, it's an ultra-powerful homelab project. So, what are you waiting for? Deploy Maintainerr today and reclaim your Plex storage space. UGREEN NASync DXP4800 GT $560 $590 Save $30 Brand Ugreen CPU AMD Ryzen Embedded R2514 Memory 8GB DDR4, expandable to 64GB Drive Bays 4 3.5/2.5-inch, 2 NVMe Ports USB-A/USB-C 10Gb/s, USB-A 480Mb/s, dual 10GbE, HDMI The Ugreen DXP4800 GT is the latest NAS from Ugreen, featuring dual 10Gb Ethernet, two NVMe slots, and a whole lot more. Shipping with 8GB of DDR4 RAM, you actually can replace it yourself and upgrade it to have up to 64GB of RAM should the need arise. Plus, UGOS continues to mature and is becoming a very solid NAS operating system. GEEKOM A7 2026 Mini PC Brand GEEKOM CPU AMD Ryzen 5 7545U Graphics AMD Radeon 740M Memory 16GB Storage 500GB Operating System Windows 11 Pro The GEEKOM A7 Mini PC's 2026 refresh comes with a lot of nice features. For starters, it ships with Windows 11 Pro pre-installed and activated. It also features a 40Gb/s USB4 port on the back, alongside 2.5 Gigabit Networking built-in. Add to that the ultra-compact size and plethora of ports, and this mini PC is ready for whatever you need. Sometimes maintenance is the best project While brand-new projects and tools are always fun, sometimes it's best to do maintenance on your homelab first. Setting up a project like Maintainerr or Intro Skipper might not sound like a super fun time, because the projects aren't all that exciting. But the end result of being able to skip your intros in Jellyfin or having your media library clean itself up will be well worth the effort you put into setting those projects up this weekend.