Projects / 2026
Rebuilding My Home Lab from Scratch
It started, as these things always do, with a cloud bill. I was paying for a VPS here, a managed database there, a password manager subscription, a file sync plan, and one evening I added it all up and realized I was renting a worse version of something I could own for the price of a used mini PC.
So I bought one. A small, quiet, second hand box with a low power CPU and more RAM than it deserved, and I gave myself one rule: everything I depend on daily either runs on this machine or has a documented reason why it doesn't.
Proxmox went on first. I'd lived in the VMware and bare metal worlds as a sysadmin, and Proxmox hits the sweet spot. Real virtualization when I want isolation, LXC when I want density, and a web UI that doesn't fight me at 1 a.m. On top of that, Docker inside a dedicated VM runs the actual workload: Vaultwarden for passwords, Nextcloud for files, Gitea for private repos, Uptime Kuma watching all of it, and a small reverse proxy terminating TLS in front of everything.
Version two, the rebuild this post is named after, was about fixing what v1 taught me the hard way. Backups went from "I'll get to it" to automated, offsite, and restore tested. The network got segmented: IoT junk on its own VLAN, services behind the proxy, nothing exposed that doesn't need to be. And I finally wrote the whole thing down, because the bus factor of a home lab is exactly one.
Is it cheaper than the cloud? Roughly, yes. The box paid for itself in under a year. But that's not the real answer. The real answer is that I understand my own infrastructure now in a way no managed service ever let me, and every 3 a.m. incident report has made me a better engineer than any course I ever took. My data, my machines, my rules.