I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

This "home lab" stuff is kind of nice hobbyist talk. I wish we had fancy words like that back in the 80s.

Technology has come along way. But I think that in tech we should be careful to not fall prey to monkey see monkey do.

We should not be deploying technology in our homes to "mimick our employers"

Remember they are miserable for a reason.

This has been a similar approach to what I did for my own homelab. I still need to setup some sort of GitOps so I don’t have to ssh into the box and manually bootstrap whatever compose file I’ve thrown on there, but that’s honestly about it.

* Docker Compose files and various folders for containers live on an NFS share

* SQLite and other databases run off a local SATA SSD for speed and reliability

* Cronjob tarballs the critical stuff nightly and throws it on another NFS share to get ingested into Backblaze B2.

Now I just get to kick back and actually experiment with new things instead of babysitting a convoluted Proxmox upgrade or shunt onto a new container standard.

Does it run rootless? Not atm (blame FreshRSS, my sole holdout). Is it super secure? Probably not, but I’m not doing anything goofy like mounting the Unix socket into a container at the very least, and the server credentials don’t work anywhere else should it get popped. The blast radius is contained, and that’s more important to me than Enterprise-grade security for my homelab (a la Wazuh, another backlog project TBD).

I think if you set cooldowns and stick to more reputable sources, it might be okay. I do pin my versions and do manual updates in my home lab, but that's more for stability and so it increases the chances I'll catch update issues while I'm already there. I don't pretend that gives me any extra security, though, because I don't have the time to review updates beyond surface-level changelogs. I don't think the solution to supply chain issues is for every developer to be paranoid at all times. I think we need better systems built on top of existing package managers to check provenance and integrity, and to allow security researchers and automated tools to vet releases before they're distributed more broadly.

I've had "servers" or a "homelab" at home for de3cades. I stopped a while ago when I burned out. About 4 month ago, I bought a new motherboard and graphics card for my desktop and dropped the old ones into a $70 case I got from Best Buy and put Ubuntu on it. I think I spent 10x that on memory for my new desktop, but that's just a passing grumble. The new server now runs transcription and embeddings for me on the old GPU. That motherboard is still plenty fast, but pushing 8 years old now. That's the advantage of buying a nice board from the outset.

The rest of the lab is a few ephemeral instances on Google, with dual A100s that spin up when I need to train things.

I put Ubuntu on the old beast, and never touch it. If the power goes out, it automatically comes on and Docker launches all the services when it comes up.

About the only thing that needs watching is the tiny SDR radio plugged into it, which I use for pure random numbers and talking to it with a hand held radio from the other house. Sometimes I have to unplug it and then plug it back in to get it back into service. No amount of finagling seems to fix it from software.

I wrote a small agent (single go binary) that does all the monitoring and maintenance for me. Possibly overkill but it is amusing to think there is a little ghost in the machine.