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I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

cleberg.net

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Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#21

Post by NBJack »

itomato wrote: post #13

Yes, but you didn’t mention anything that would suggest a need to ‘maintain’. It doesn’t change. Many people keep swapping gear in so they can learn BGP on Cisco edge gear or run clusters on salvaged IB. OP is not that person.

I gotta agree. I setup a homelab originally to start learning more about virtualization, Kubernetes, etc. It was painful, required time to fix my mistakes, and I hit my head on the ugly realities of distributed hardware. But it was also experience I could (and did) apply to my job.

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#22

Post by botfriendsarent »

itomato wrote: post #15
botfriendsarent wrote: post #12

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.

We did. We just didn’t classify it with a hashtag. Frankenstein couldn’t build a monster without influence. Same thing here. “CCNA? I’ll show you CCNA…”

I had a friend back in the 90s who referred to his desktop computer as "his mainframe" lol

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#23

Post by embedding-shape »

kamov wrote: post #6

> I've approximated it somewhere around 15 minutes of maintenance per month, barring an emergency. If that's normal to you, congrats - you've peaked in life. However, that's absolutely absurd to me. I used to spend days on end building, maintaining, and debugging various aspects of my servers, databases, apps, etc. It's been normal for me for the past 3 years thanks to using NixOS for all server infrastructure.

Same. As someone who is OK with a small amount of maintenance every N months, but keeps forgetting how things are setup or what I did, moving absolutely everything into Nix and running NixOS made things a hell of a lot simpler when you come back after 6 months and can easily find where and what to change, as long as you take care to declaratively set things up via Nix as much as possible, and use git.

Helps that things are really easy to test too, spin up a new test VM with your new config and copy of real data, check if it works, then apply the change to the real hardware and you're good to go. Alternatively, do it live with a copy of real data, then rollback in case it doesn't work.

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#24

Post by jmbwell »

I’m so almost here. The thing holding me back is projects that don’t do their own migrations reliably. Through no fault of their own, perhaps, though at this point I would argue LLMs should eliminate any good reason not to have alembic integrated or something. And even Home Assistant is bizarrely averse to fully automated system wide updates. Updating system and core and addons all independently is bonkers. But yes, the simplest implementation is often the best

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#26

Post by cheschire »

bilekas wrote: post #11
cheschire wrote: post #10

I suspect my approach is even more controversial… I just open Claude code and type /routine-maintenance and it reads the skill file, logs into all my systems on my home network and runs updates, validate backups are still healthy, update any docker images, checks SMART stats, reviews some logs, and then fires off an email using brevo to tell me any future maintenance concerns I might have. Edit: zero minutes old alre…

But using AI is not the point of the article.

The headline: “It's true. I don't maintain my homelab… it maintains itself.”

So using AI is not the point of the article but neither was it mine.

My point was I also attempt to implement homelab automation rather than manual maintenance, and I listed a few things that are onerous to do regularly by hand just like the article.

But I totally expected people to just skim my message, see “AI” and dismiss it, so I’m not terribly upset.

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#27

Post by silversmith »

I also have a "homelab" with minimal maintenance requirements. I'd wager it works out to much less than 15 minutes a month over a year. The strategy is as follows: pin all services to known good versions, deny access from outside LAN, and don't touch it unless there's a new service release with new features I want. Not something I would do at work, but perfectly fine for home setting.

Re: I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

#29

Post by rcxdude »

meindnoch wrote: post #25

Yeah, and what happens when every now and then upstream changes break your config? Like when Debian removed systemd-resolved, breaking mDNS.

Then you spend a bit of time fixing it. With the right stack, these things are rare and not often difficult to resolve.
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