MUST HAVE Home Server Companion Apps (mobile)

I am one that definitely prefers to manage all my home server stuff on a computer. When it comes to anything you're going to be running in a home lab, for the most part, it's just going to be a better platform. But, there are situations in which I do need to make some adjustments, changes, or do something on a phone here. If you have a home lab, home server services, you've probably gotten the call from a loved one while you're in the middle of working, out and about on the road, that hey, Plex or Jellyfin has a playback error. Hey, can you add this show to Emby? Why isn't Home Assistant working? And usually these problems can be fixed with a simple Docker container restart or a couple taps in an app. So, in this video, that's what we're going to be doing. We're going to be checking out the apps that I actually use on my phone here pretty consistently for managing my home lab. Even though again, it's not my preferred format. I unfortunately here have an iPhone, but most of these are cross-platform or I'll give you Android alternatives. And there's some cases that if you have an Android, the Android alternative is better than what you could get on Apple. And I'll note that when we get to it. The first one we are going to talk about is over here. It is ProxMox Mobile. This app is incredible for managing ProxMox. I have one ProxMox server, which you can see right here. It's a little Minisforum mini PC. And I can see just about everything. I can see all my VMs here. I got my Windows and Home Assistant VM up and running. And then all my LXC containers. So, for example, if I jump into maybe this proxy one, which runs Nginx Proxy Manager, you can see I got a good amount of information on it. We got our disk, our bandwidth, we have some statistics here. So, we can see our actual CPU utilization, whether it be the day, week, month. I had a big spike there. I wonder what happened. Probably ran an update or something. All the network traffic. And then we have some controls. But, what's really cool to me is the VNC terminal. So, you can quickly access your actual terminal for ProxMox this way without having to use some other terminal app, which we will get into. But, I will note that is unfortunately a premium feature. in settings, if I go over to premium, you can see what's going on here. You have a pretty basic control and monitoring stuff without having to pay for this. But, if you want that VNC access, terminal access, and push notifications, that's where you're going to have to pay for it. Six bucks lifetime. The one thing with a lot of these apps is there isn't a huge audience for them. So, I mean, these developers got to make some money. People got to eat. And this is one I'm definitely going to purchase once my little free trial thing is over. You have other settings here, too. Not a lot. We have VM LXC. So, you can change this, how some things look. Overall, this is a great app if you are a ProxMox user. And you just need something real simple to restart LXC containers, jump in, run some quick commands. This is a handy tool to have. Next up, and this is kind of a newer one I've been playing around with. I'm still not sure if I want to purchase it. Again, most of these apps do have paid options, unfortunately. But, here we have Whale Deck. So, right now I've only connected my Unraid machine to it, which is running basically my server stack. So, if I open up containers, we got a whole list of everything I have running. So, for example, if I go into Overseerr, we have more information. So, just pretty kind of Docker stuff that you'd expect. If I hit this little bolt, I can quickly restart the containers if I would like to. So, if I go like that, that it worked. And right here, uh Whale Pro. So, ooh, 40 bucks lifetime. Uh The real cool thing with this one is it can do widgets, which I would love some widgets. I mean, if I keep it on here and I keep opening it, I'll probably go for it. Additionally, if I hit this button right here, we can see the logs. So, if I show logs, we get a nice little summary of everything that's going on. So, you can monitor that. If you get a message while you're out and about saying something's not working, you can dive right into the logs, see if it's something obvious that you can fix or that a restart will do. So, that is definitely nice. And then we can see like our networks here. We can see our volumes. So, just pretty simple kind of Docker management stuff. If I go over to overview, servers, you can see my Unraid server. So, we have a pretty nice little set of metrics here. Tap on that, and that's where we get all the containers, networks, and everything kind of consolidated into one page. And in a minute, there's another application that does similar Docker features. But, first before we get into that, I do need to thank the sponsor of today's video. This is the GL.iNet GL.iNet POE. If you have any experience with their travel routers, you probably know this thing's going to be nice. I was playing around with this yesterday. It I like it quite a bit. You can see here, it's just a little tiny guy. It supports POE, which is nice, or USB-C power delivery. From enterprise and industrial server racks to industrial control panels or to my home lab. This thing enables you to rapidly have access with KVM to your devices. KVM is usually nice compared to remote access. The out-of-band management ensures a 24/7 access even in cases of system failures, no software required on control devices. As you can see here, I just open my browser, log in, and I'm immediately inside the control panel, where I can fully control this mini PC running ProxMox. So, if you're into home labs like I am, I'm sure that you're going to find this incredibly useful. Seamless Tailscale integration. While I do prefer Netbird, it is cool that that's integrated. All this working great together while requiring no additional software or recurring fees. So, this little device definitely has a permanent place in my home lab. So, if you're interested in checking this out for yourself, do. Go to the link down below. They have it on Amazon and Shopify. So, go ahead and check it out today. So, from there we have two different terminal applications. The first one is tried and true. Second one is kind of like an all-in-one platform. And this first one is going to be Termius, Terminus, something like that. This one right here. This is what I tend to use mostly for actually accessing things. Really, the only thing I have on this one right here is Hostinger cuz I've been playing around with that. So, if I just tap on it, it would connect. I think I changed my password. But, it's really easy to add new hosts. So, I could just go new host. This one is going to be my Oh, upload finished. That's a little sneak peek for another app that we're going to look at. Get out of here. You just type an IP address. This is my Nextcloud VM. We're going to use SSH. You have Mosh. So, this one has a ton of different options. You can easily put in your SSH keys here. I am going to type in my username, password. And for this setup, we should be good to go. We have a bunch of different themes here, which is super cool. So, if I went ahead and changed it to something like the Everforest dark. Let's select that one and hit the green, and it should go ahead and connect right up for us. There we go. And boom. Just like that, we are in. Oh, that's for Hostinger. Let's close that out. And this just makes it really nice to like run commands. It has a really nice auto fill. So, sudo apt update. And we might as well do a sudo apt upgrade -y. Enter. Look at that. We're We're flying. We're going. I don't have enough time to go over all the different features of this specific application. If I hit this little plus, I can establish a straight-up SFTP connection. So, let's do that with this little Nextcloud server. And just like that, we are navigating through just about everything. Unfortunately, I can't do YML edits directly through here. That's That would be cool. Feature request, dare I say? You can see down here we have some tabs on the bottom. So, I could close those out to get where I need to go. And if I hit this right here, you could see a bunch of different controls. You could change the themes. We could get a log of all the commands that we ran. You could create snippets. So, if there's something that's like a large command or a little automation, just a script that you need to do consistently, you can save them right in here, which is nice. If I go ahead and back out, those are our vaults. So, you can store all your credentials and everything there. We have connections. So, you could see I have one connection up and running. If I close it out, I could do so real easy. And then here we have a connection history. And then we have some profile settings. So, you could save all your access keys and stuff there. I generally don't like to do that personally. Overall, this one here is a really good application. Now, that takes us to this guy, NeoServer. I really like this one. But, the problem is, if I do recall, it ain't cheap, just like that other Docker one. But, I'd almost rather have this one than that other Docker manager. This one, first we have metrics. So, you can see I have Hostinger, Nextcloud image, Unraid. So, I have four different machines connected in here. If I open up Unraid, for example, we can see a whole bunch of data and statistics on what our server is doing, the temperature, the actual processes. If I tap on it, we can shrink that down, expand it. We can see the memory, all the disk usage, a whole bunch different things about our server, the network speeds, what the network's doing. So, any little metric or anything that you could imagine is right in here ready to go. And if I scroll up here, actually go over to container, and then go to Unraid, this one has all this built in. So, you can see like last time we checked out Overseerr. So, if I open that up, we get pretty basic Docker information on what is going on here. We have pretty basic control, terminal, log, all that stuff. Quickly restart. But, it is nice that all that's in there without having to jump into CLI and execute Docker commands. Really nice. But, of course, we do have the terminal. So, I can connect to my Unraid machine here. Now we're in. So, then we would be able to execute commands just like you normally would. And I think if I just hit this X here, yep, that closes out the session. You can open multiple sessions. If I go over here to script, you can just like with the other one, you can add scripts. So, I personally am debating to either use this one app or to use Terminus or whatever and the other Docker manager, the what was it? Whale Deck together. I don't know. NeoServer is pretty good. NeoServer is iOS only. If you have a really good client very similar to this on Android, please let me know. I couldn't find one in the kind of limited amount of searching I did. But, Terminus is available on Android, so that is good. Now, the next thing that we're going to talk about is either Pi-hole or AdGuard. Both of these apps created by the same developer. Right now, at this particular instance, I'm running AdGuard Home, but the Pi-hole app is almost identical. Again, same developer. This is the AdGuard Home remote. The Pi-hole one is called Pi-hole remote, and we just have some pretty basic metrics here. So, you could see I spun up this new AdGuard server there, just switched back. I I go back and forth. I like to play around, experiment a bit. But, here we can manage just about everything. Go to DNS queries, we can see what's going on, blocking that Plex analytics, which is good. But, we have statistics, so we get a lot of information, see the local IP addresses of the machines that are actually connecting, of our top clients. Basically, anything that you would see in the actual web browser, you can get here. And I think they do have a premium version, which yeah, AdGuard Home remote Pro, which that is where you get into like managing um DHCP and DNS settings remotely. But, honestly, my main use case for this, other than looking at like a pretty graph, is just to do kind of one of those. That's about it. That's what I use it for. Granted, it's cool. I don't need to manage DNS and stuff on the road really. But, if you use the hell out of it, that's an option. Next up, and this is going to be of no surprise, and that is Immich. If you're somebody who is using Google Photos, Amazon Photos, whatever it may be, ditch it and go try out Immich. Immich here is a full featured replacement for those platforms I just mentioned. It automatically backups photos, which is great, and it incorporates some of the features that you'd expect in some of those cloud providers, such as a map. Open up the map, we can see a bunch of different stuff, all the places that I've been. So, that's personally one of my favorite features about it. Whenever I remember, "Oh, I'm looking for this picture that I took in this country." Open up the map, zoom right in, and it's really easy to find. Of course, has facial recognition, favorites, you can create photo albums. If you have it set up uh to a public proxy, whether if you use Cloudflare or whatever, you can share albums with people pretty easily. So, like if you open up an image, it's really easy to share, archive, delete, you can favorite them. If it's uh an iPhone, so I can hit play, so it'll kind of play the actual little clip that those record, and I can edit it, of course, throw a filter on it. The editing features aren't that extensive, but that's not really the point of this. It's mostly a backup solution. And then that takes us to another staple in our home lab, and that is Nextcloud and some of the companion applications. So, of course, Nextcloud itself is awesome. You can see here, I have all my different files and whatnot. I manage just about everything through Nextcloud, all the videos I record, all my work stuff, tax documents, just everything is there. So, it's real nice to just have access to this anywhere in the world really easily. So, like my projects folder, for example, a little sneak peek, you can see some of the stuff going on in there. You can do automatic media backups, but for that I use Immich, it's just more full featured. You can also use their little AI assistant directly in here, which is nice, but I honestly don't use this as an app that much. Whenever I use this, I'm usually in front of a computer, but it is nice just to be able to quickly grab and share things with this. What I do use is more of the companion apps. For example, we have Nextcloud notes right there, which I use that instead of like the default note application installed on a phone. It's a pretty simple note application. I deleted the content out of this one, but you just do your note, you hit the check, you delete it, you can share them, close it out. When you close it out, it just lists all your other notes. Pretty simple, but another one that I have really started using is Next News. You can actually add a add-on in Nextcloud, which is an RSS feed, and then have an actual application to manage all this. So, for example, you can say I have some OMG Ubuntu stuff, Bleeping Computer, but mostly just tech stuff I have in here. So, uh if I open up this one, get a nice little short description, and then I can open up the actual link. So, it makes it real nice to kind of skim news from sources I actually care about. All this is self-hosted. It's just nice. And then we can sort it various ways, change the layout. We can mark all as read. Again, pretty basic, but also pretty functional in that regard. Now, we have Radarr. This one is really nice if you have Sonarr and Radarr. So, you can see all your movies and shows. If I hit the little plus here, it's really easy to search and add things. So, then later on you can organize it, purchase the DVD, so then you can rip them later, and then use those tools as like organizational and file renaming tools. But, you can see activity if you have activity, a calendar of things that are going to be released that are actually in your um your libraries or watchlists. And then we have some settings. So, pretty simple app. It does what it needs to do. But, I wish I wish I wish they had this on Android, and that is NZB360. That application for Android, if you have Sonarr, Radarr, all that stuff, this is a must-have. Because not only does it integrate with those two, it integrates with your download clients as well. So, then you can monitor and manage just about everything. I believe it's a paid app, but oh boy, is it worth it. If they released it for iOS at double the price, I would purchase it. Now, these next few I'm not going to dive too far into because they're pretty simple. The first one is nzb360 remote. This is a Plex manager. I know, I know. Unfortunately, I still use Plex. I personally, in my heart, prefer Jellyfin, but I have so many family members on my Plex server, it's just easier. Some things about it work better, such as captions and like the changing or the selecting the quality. This isn't a Plex defensive video. They Some of their actions are indefensible. But, nzb360 is nice because I basically use it at least on my phone just to see if somebody's watching something before I like restart a server. That's basically it. I mean, nzb360 has a bunch of other features and stuff, but that's not what this video is about. This is about using them for mobile. See all kinds of statistics, set up newsletters, but all I use it for is to see if somebody's watching Plex. And then there's the NetBird app. I mean, pretty simple remote connection. I have a network route set up, so I can use my local domain name that I set up in a different video. Got some peers connected here. That's about it. And [snorts] then one I really like is Bitwarden here. This is a password manager. Real easy to connect to a self-hosted server. I'm using Vaultwarden, which is a more kind of open-sourcey version of Bitwarden. I would definitely definitely recommend it. We have password generator right in here, various settings. You can send sensitive information directly through it. And then we have my vault with all my logins, secure notes, which is mostly I think API keys. I got one card in there. I kind of mix and match this and Apple's implementation. But, this is a this is a good one to have right here. And then the very last thing that I use, and this one is really the only one that's kind of hardware dependent, and that's going to be UniFi stuff. I recently got a bunch of UniFi stuff, and their apps are awesome. I love them. They're pretty. You got some sweet sweet deal metrics here, including their access point deployment. You can get your ISP speeds directly through here. So, you can see where I'm at. Let's see what's going on. Damn. My golly. [clears throat] The upload speed is going to be a little slower. It's it's technically still coaxial. Not the point. Just jump right into the network topology here, so we can see everything that's going on, how all my UniFi devices are connected together. Then I can add a bunch of stuff to make it real complicated here. But, that's a good app. Another one I was using is Omada. I had their hardware for a while. Both platforms are great. UniFi, a bit more polished, a bit more features on their application. But, if your networking equipment has an app, it's definitely a good one to grab to go in and make uh quick adjustments, quick changes, run tests. Overall, it's nice. So, with all that, those are the applications that I use. I'll have links to all of them down below. I am really curious, what do you guys use? I know there's probably some like perfect goldmine of an app that I probably missed that will like just be the ultimate solution that I'm looking for. So, please give me a list of the apps that you use to manage your home lab. Even if I already listed them, I am curious. So, put those down below. Again, big thank you to GL.iNet for sponsoring this video. I love their hardware. I mean, I bought this travel modem from them quite a while back, and it has done me well. With that, have a great one. Subscribe. Please leave a comment and let me know your apps, and I will see you in the next one.

Checkout the new Comet PoE from GL.iNet! Awesome, low profile, easy to use KVM: Amazon: https://link.gl-inet.com/rm1pe-techhut-amazonus-20251112 Shopify Store: https://link.gl-inet.com/rm1pe-techhut-usstore-20251112 Managing your homelab shouldn't require lugging around a laptop. Here are the essential mobile apps to monitor your server, manage Docker containers, and control your infrastructure right from your pocket. 📖 RESOURCES Links to apps, if missing just search: Proxmobo - https://proxmobo.app WhaleDeck (iPhone, expensive) - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/docker-manager-gui-whaledeck/id1581548562 Termius - https://termius.com/index.html NeoServer (iPhone) - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/neoserver-ssh-client-terminal/id6448362669 Pi-Hole/AdGuard Remote (iPhone) - https://rocketscience-it.nl Pi-Hole Client (Android Alt.) - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.tsutsu3.pi_hole_client AdGuard (Android Alt.) - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.adguard.android.contentblocker Immich - https://docs.immich.app/features/mobile-app/ Ruddarr (iPhone) - https://github.com/ruddarr/app NZB360 (Android) - https://nzb360.com Tutulli Remote - https://github.com/Tautulli/Tautulli-Remote NetBird - https://docs.netbird.io/get-started/install/mobile 🏆 FOLOW TECHHUT X (Twitter): https://bit.ly/twitter-techhut MASTODON: https://bit.ly/mastodon-techhut BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/techhut.bsky.social INSTAGRAM: https://bit.ly/personal-insta 👏 SUPPORT TECHHUT (all links below this line will earn us commission) BUY A COFFEE: https://buymeacoffee.com/techhut YOUTUBE MEMBER: https://bit.ly/members-techhut —PAID/AFFILIATE LINKS BELOW— 🛎 RECOMMENDED SERVICES VPN I USE: https://airvpn.org/?referred_by=673908 📷 MY GEAR HARD DRIVES: https://serverpartdeals.com/techhut MinisForum Tablet: https://amzn.to/3SeMmds Beelink N200: https://amzn.to/3xZjeQs Raspberry Pi 5: https://amzn.to/4f3yUCN Q1 HE QMK Custom Keyboard: https://www.keychron.com/products/keychron-q1-he-qmk-wireless-custom-keyboar?ref=techhut ASUS ProArt Display: https://amzn.to/4i4cAKz 00:00 - Intro 01:00 - Proxmobo 02:42 - WhaleDeck (expensive) 04:17 - GL.iNet Comet (sponsor) 05:36 - Termius 08:06 - NeoServer 10:01 - Pi-Hole Remote 11:14 - Immich 12:23 - NextCloud 13:15 - NextCloud Notes 13:35 - NextNews 14:15 - Ruddarr 14:52 - NZB360 15:19 - Tutulli Remote 16:08 - NetBird 16:21 - Bitwarden 16:54 - UniFi 17:54 - What are you using?