Blog Renewal, Homelab Edition

Another year has begun.

It's been 5 years since I wrote anything to post here. There's a number of reasons for that, and maybe someday I'll write about them.

The reason I wanted to start writing again is to document the process of getting my home technology/homelab into the state that I want them to be in. My life has been undergoing a lot of change lately, and my surrounding technology needs to catch up.

Some of the projects I want to complete are:

  • Setting up computers for my kids (with appropriate parental monitoring/control)
  • Building/configuring a new desktop for me
  • Updating my backup strategies for my machines
  • Updating the segmentation of my network
  • Building a new virtualization server to take load off my NAS
  • Going way deeper into home automation
  • De-googling where the convenience/privacy tradeoff is favourable to do so
  • Setting up game servers for the kids (e.g. Minecraft)
  • Moving this blog to a static site generator
  • A lot more, I'm sure

What's also important to me this time is that I'm building everything in a way that ultimately requires the least mainentance from me. That means that everything in my network should at least be:

  • Automated & Reproducible (i.e. built from code/Ansible/Terraform)
  • Monitored
  • Secured (e.g. Firewalled, auto-updated)
  • Backed up
  • Documented
  • Automatically tested

That's going to be a lot of work, but it will also be a lot of fun. If we're existing friends in meatspace and you think tinkering with someone else's servers would be fun, drop me a line. I'm open to trusted collaborators.

A couple of weeks ago I already went through an adventure in re-organizing storage. I'll see if I can get that written up this week. I'm pretty whelmed right now so I wouldn't count on it.

I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes. Should be fun.