A Tour of My Homelab, Part The First: Why It Exists and What It’s Built On
It all started in 2009, when I bought a Drobo.
The Drobo was connected to my definitely-not-a-Hackintosh and contained a carefully curated collection of completely legitimate media filesLinux ISOs, which were being delivered by Serviio to my Panasonic Smart TV. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked. Mostly.
That was the whole setup: one slightly cursed desktop, one weird little storage cube, one TV, and some media server software that I am fairly sure was held together with good vibes and Java.
At the time, that felt like the dream. I could put files in one place and watch them somewhere else. Incredible. The future had arrived, and it was buffering in 720p.
Since then, things have spiralled a little. The Drobo became a dedicated NAS. The media server became Plex plus all the relevant *arrs. The standalone desktop became actual repurposed small form factor PCsdedicated servers. Then, blink and I almost missed it, the network became something that needed a diagram.
At some point there was internal DNS, certificates, and VLANs. Then monitoring, because apparently it is not enough for things to break. I needed a dashboard to tell me something was broken.
Eventually, the lab stopped being just the stuff in my house. Throw in an IRC bouncer, an application server, and a web server as well, because apparently the monster needed external limbs.
That is where the homelab became less of a cupboard full of computers and more of a demonic creature with multiple tentacles.
None of this was planned. There was no grand architecture. No design document. No carefully staged roadmap from “watching TV shows on an early 21st century flat screen” to “maintaining a distributed private infrastructure environment with identity, naming, trust, reverse proxies, backups, telephony, databases, and custom monitoring.”
It just happened. One server became several. One “the Wi-Fi is down” became “have you tried restarting the management plane?”
