Leveling Up My Homelab

Summary

For as long as I’ve worked in tech, I’ve had some kind of homelab (even if I didn’t call it that at the time). It started as a hand-me-down desktop that I used as my first Linux server in my childhood bedroom and eventually grew to a few devices stacked in a rack, some smart plugs on a VLAN, and a handful of bash scripts glued together to make things work. But over time, it started to feel more like a pile of parts than an intentional system.This post is the beginning of a series documenting the rebuild – both as a technical reference and as a way to keep myself honest. The new setup is focused on designing and building something resilient, extensible, and useful. Something that helps me grow as an engineer, experiment freely, and run serious infrastructure on my own terms.The Old Setup: Just Enough To Be Dangerous(Evidently, I never took a picture of the old rack with all of the equipment in it. This picture shows the in-progress version of it without the Mac Mini and such. I’ll be better about documenting my builds in the future!)The most recent iteration of my homelab was small, straightforward, and (at least for a while), good enough:ComputeMac Mini (M1, 8GB RAM)Beelink SER3 mini PC (Ryzen 7 3750H, 16GB RAM)StorageNetworkingUniFi Dream Machine SEUniFi UAP AC ProPowerTripp Lite SMART1500LCD UPSCyberPower CPS1215RM PDUI bundled all of this up into a 9U Navepoint rack. It was clean and quiet. I could SSH into a box or log into a UI and just get things done. There weren’t a lot of moving parts – and that was intentional.But as my goals grew more ambitious, the limitations started to show.What I likedCompact footprint: Easy to fit in a closet, minimal cablingLow mental overhead: No orchestration layers, no IaC, no GitOps: just click/SSH and go.Manageable complexity: I always knew were things were because I’d set them up by hand.What Held Me BackSynology NAS was underpowered: I couldn’t run Docker due to hardware limitations. All of the better models that supported Do...