A canceled homelab project

I flirted on Mastodon that I was going to rebuild my homelab. In the end, I decided against it and I’m happy with that decision.

Honestly, the decision to rebuild it wasn’t due to limitations of the current configuration. Rather, it was due to boredom and fear of wasting good hardware. I have my homelab listed on the hardware page on this blog if you want to see the specs. Short version is a mini N100 PC as the server and a SFF Optiplex for a NAS. What was eating at me is I have a desktop (specs on same hardware page) that sits off 90% of the time. That desktop has a 16 thread CPU with 64GB of RAM. It feels like such a shame to let it sit off nearly every day. I started thinking about switching it to my homelab and converting the homelab into an all-in-one build.

I even started building it. I cloned my desktop HDD and then laid out how I was going to configure the drives. It broke down like this:

• root and home on a 256GB 2.5" SSD
• 512GB m.2 NVMe for virtual machine storage
• 480GB 2.5" SSD dedicated to Nextcloud
• 2 x 4TB for backups, configured in a zfs pool
• 20TB HDD for media storage and data hoarding

I got an OS installed, secured it, configured ssh and mounted all the disks. Then, I stopped.

I thought more about my current setup. It works fantastically. For lack of a better phrase, it just works. Hardware acceleration works for Jellyfin, I recently sparsed the VM qcow2 storage, and I have 99%+ uptime. I hate to touch this setup since everything has been humming along for months without issue. Yet, I endeavored on due to boredom. I have been looking for a project to work on in my free time at home (what little I have) and here was something I could do, even if it felt pointless.

Then I looked at my notes and realized I have extremely thorough notes on my current setup. Actually, I’m kind of impressed at the effort I put into the notes. Step-by-step on all the containers and virtual machines. All the compose files. Trees laying out how drives are configured and what services point to what directiories. Mind maps of my backup strategy. Speaking of that, a backup system I trust is setup and nearly fully automated. All these notes are neatly compiled in a single directory and presented in a way someone else could navigate my homelab should the unthinkable happen.

The more I looked at my setup, the notes, my backups, and how well it is performing, the less I wanted to work on this project. Then I saw the dates of my notes. All were written in April of last year. That was the final straw. How can I rebuild something that is working exactly the way I want it and is only one year old?

I know there are people who like to tinker. They use it as a way to learn or to push themselves. What do I need to learn? I’m a fucking landscape contractor. I don’t have career path that needs me to learn more than what I currently have.

So, projec canned. I flashed my desktop clone back to the boot drive and put the extra drives back into the storage bin. As of today it is as if nothing happened.

Oh well.

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