Household control plane
The stuff you pay for every month, running on a machine in your cupboard.
A few hundred people wrote free replacements for Google Photos, Dropbox, Spotify, 1Password and the rest, and gave them away. Ultralab is the one screen that installs them, keeps them apart from your files until you say otherwise, and tells you the truth about what each one is about to do to your machine.
Windows and Linux. Free. No account, no telemetry, nothing phones anywhere.
What it actually is
A shop, not a parts bin
Fifty-six applications, arranged by what you would want one for rather than where it sits
in a stack. Search dropbox and it finds Nextcloud. Every card says what the
thing stands in for, and what it will cost your machine in memory.
A fitting room
The Sandbox runs anything in its own compose project, its own volumes, its own network, with every port moved out of the way and no Dataset mounted in. Try it, keep it or bin it. What it cannot contain — a host device, the host network, root — it refuses outright rather than pretending.
Nothing happens by surprise
Before you install anything it reads out every container it will start, every folder it will mount and whether it can write there, every port it opens, and everything it is handed that the sandbox could not hold on to.
Setups you can swap
Get the lab working the way you want, save it as a Build, then go and build the same job a different way. Put the old one back whenever you like, or try a new one in the Sandbox beside the one that is running.
The front door is a VPN
Nothing here opens a port to the internet. Remote access is a WireGuard peer, because forwarding an application's admin page is how households get broken into.
It composes; it does not replace
Jellyfin is Jellyfin. Immich is Immich. Ultralab writes the compose file, pins the image to a digest, keeps the passwords out of the YAML and stays out of the way.
What it will not do
A control plane that overpromises is worse than none, so the refusals are written down and kept to:
- It does not manage your disks. No formatting, no partitioning, no ZFS, no RAID. It reads what the host has and reports it. Your distribution's installer is better at the rest than this would be.
- It is not a media server, and it does not analyse anything. The catalogue is filenames and SHA-256. No scraper, no perceptual hashing, no model, nothing sent anywhere.
- It is not a mail host. It will check whether mail from your connection would actually be accepted, and tell you plainly when the answer is no.
- It does not apply firewall rules from Windows. It writes the ruleset; you apply it on the Linux host, deliberately.
Not a backup. Ultralab keeps a catalogue and can snapshot it, and a Build saves the shape of a lab. Neither is a copy of your photos. Install something that makes one, put it somewhere this machine cannot reach, and read it back once.
Where to start
Never run a home lab before
The manual starts from what a home lab even is, and what machine you need.
Know what you are doing
Get the binary, run it, and the app explains itself page by page.