I don't maintain my homelab, it maintains itself

I used to think of my home setup as a homelab but I've realized for about 4 years now I barely do anything with it beyond what it's supposed to do. I just have some basic services running, most time spent over the last 4 years has to do with broadcom acquiring vmware so I had to switch to Proxmox, and then just moving houses and having to setup again.

I run the mediatech department in an university. My tech requirement for any infrastructure boils down to three basic questions:

  1. How often do I have to touch it during the next ten years?  
  
  2. How many of the times that I have to touch it are because I decided to do so?  
  
  3. How much pain is it to fix and understand if I had my mind erased?  
  

This often works out in favour of dead simple solutions.

I don’t have a “homelab”, just an old mac mini that runs jellyfin, gonic and calibre (content server), and on which I do try some linux things. It runs Debian and the actual maintenance is mostly “apt update && apt upgrade”.

I don’t use docker, I’d rather create my own packages. And if a project is too trigger happy about requiring new dependency version, I drop them.

Thanks! I'm a nerd, for sure.

I've built an SDR radio stack to integrate with a single pane navigation and chart plotting app I'm building for my new company. You use the radio to talk to the local agent (I just finished a submission to the Gemma Challenge on HF to learn how to train models). Wake words show up on the glass, for security. Been working on training a small model to do agentic controls, including changing autopilot and switching displays when you want to see other content on the screen. I've been working on isochrone routing and have it working well now. Waiting for Fabel to come back to continue the work...

Everything is here: https://deepbluedynamics.com. It's just me as an LLC. No VC. No backers. No users, yet. Few stars, but 100% written by me, and most of it is open source. FWIW, I've been around the block and I'm getting old now. So the radio helps with arthritic fingers! :) The radio stack stuff lives here: https://nuts.services/sdrrand

I'm also integrating the voice stuff into Hyperia, my terminal emulator forked from Hyper Terminal. It's on Github. Hyperia is also agentic controlled, so I can talk to it by pane name to inject text into the prompts. This lets me get up and roam while I'm roaming around. I'm remodeling my front house, and for a while I had one of those smart lights turning red or blue when things happened in the sessions, but I want something I can talk to without having to click and type. I use the Windows transcription feature a lot, but talking on the radio to it is much easier.

Oh and to answer your question about random numbers, I use them for various Monte Carlo based approaches. For example, I inject those numbers into training runs, rolls for the iChing (helpful for feeding agents for decision busting), and seeding other things like simulated wind speeds and current (in the sim beause I'm not sitting on a boat). I even use it for sampling documents I've been indexing (cut up a bunch of business books and have a local model use them for reference).

I have the SDRrand sources wired into almost everything now that needs randomness. Is it necessary? Maybe. We only get pseudo random numbers from computers, so I just attached to the purity of it, if anything.

Me and all my friends are active homelabbers and selfhosters.

Recently one had their first baby, so they migrated from Fedora to RHEL, just to spend less time on upgrades. :D I thought that was cute. Like RHEL is so stable, even a first time parent can use it.