My Little Corner of the Physical Internet

My Little Corner of the Physical Internet
I look exactly like this guy when playing with my compooooters... until I realize it is 2:35 am. Generated by Microsoft Image Generator (DALL-E): "geek that is typing on a computer surrounded by network switches, computer monitors, and server, cartoon style"

Wow, this thing has been in draft for two years. Well I'm back to being happy with my homelab after being crushed by work, fatherhood, renovation oh my!

My two buddies have great homelabs. One fella ran his on desktops and NAS, the other guy had a full rack with his own Internet subnet and and LTE fail over. But honestly the first guy more practically used his kit to host Plex and all those Linux ISOs. I wanted one, and had been away from computers for a long time so I bought my first from another homelabber upgrading, a Dell T620.

Next thing I know, I'm running proxmox, getting familiar with Debian and Ubuntu (those that know, know). I even dabbled in macos and nixos, haos and pfsense, docker VMs, lxcs, cloud backup - the whole works.

Know I'm the real slim shady

Basically everything I thought I *might* use I loaded on there. It's the journey not the destination: solving all those configuration issues, permissions, and passing of GPU to lxc was a pain but not I can routinely solve most of my issues for a service I actually want. Without being a p'arrrrrite, I mostly use immich, jellyfin, and navidrome to get my media fix. And then npm, heimdall, ghost, home assistant for most everything else. I'm at peace without chasing that hardware game but I also have offloaded my dependence on external services that can disappear at anytime.

I've had a split setup for a few years now, wire guarding two sites together. Recently I've replaced my router and shifted my main host so I don't need to bounce between a smish smash of subdomains. I even wired my house with cat6 and built my rack out of wood (because, why not?) Is my journey coming to an end?

Obviously not. The lab must grow. But at least it's mostly functional, mostly fun, and mostly complete so I can get hopefully equal amounts of pleasure fixing it as I do using it.