The Home Lab

Overview#

Everything on this site so far has been built on someone else's hardware, in someone else's building. The media server is a homelab in every respect except the one the name is about. It runs on decommissioned office equipment, in a server room I don't own, for a property I work at rather than live in.

This project is the real version. Same skills, my hardware, my house.

It doesn't exist yet, and it won't for a while. I'm listing it anyway, because it's the thing every other project on this page has quietly been preparing for.

Why it's gatekept#

The blocker isn't technical. It isn't money either, really.

I don't have the home in homelab.

Six years in the MNDF, and now hospitality on a resort island. Both are jobs where you live where you work. There's no spare room, no cupboard to put a rack in, no permanent address where a machine can sit quietly running for years without me. Everything I own has to be portable enough to move at short notice.

So this waits for two things: getting married, and settling into a job where I go home at the end of the day rather than living on site. Both are firmly in the plan. Neither has a date.

What I know I want#

A media library. Jellyfin, or whatever has replaced it by then. I've already built this once and I know exactly how I'd do it differently: ZFS from the start, sensible library structure from day one, and no salvaged decade-old drives holding anything I'd miss.

Immich for photos. This is arguably the whole point. Photo and video backup that I control, that doesn't quietly raise its subscription price, and that doesn't hold a decade of memories hostage to whether a company still wants to be in that business next year. Of everything on this list, this is the one with actual stakes.

What I might build#

The interesting part is the stuff that doesn't exist as an off-the-shelf container.

Having built the Tracker, I know how much better a tool fits when you write it for exactly one household instead of a market. So the likely first custom app is something mundane and genuinely useful: chores, household inventory, what needs replacing and when, whose turn it is. The same instinct that turned a folder of spreadsheets into a web app, pointed at a house instead of a training log.

Beyond that it's open. Document storage, recipes, home automation, a dashboard that ties it together. I'd rather decide those with a real house and real problems in front of me than pre-plan a stack I'll abandon.

Hardware: undecided#

Deliberately so. Choosing hardware years before you need it means buying the wrong thing at the wrong price.

What I do know is that the media server taught me the two rules I'll be shopping by: old enterprise gear is not automatically an upgrade, and the disks matter more than the chassis. Whatever this ends up being, it'll be chosen for quiet, power draw and reliability over specifications that look impressive in a listing.

Why it's on this page at all#

Because a roadmap that only contains things you're certain about isn't honest.

This is the project the media server was rehearsal for: Linux, virtualization, storage, networking, containers, and the judgement about when to stop fighting hardware that's already lost. All of it learned on equipment I had to hand back.

At some point I'll get to build it properly, once, for myself. That page will be considerably more interesting than this one.