Homelab Ops

Problem

A homelab stops being a hobby the moment your household depends on it. Mine crossed that line — DNS, home automation, media, document storage and password-adjacent SSO all run on it. At that point the failure mode is no longer "a service is down." It is "I no longer remember why this is configured this way, and the person who knew is me six weeks ago."

My role

Sole architect and operator. Every host, every compose file, every decision record.

Constraints

• Single operator, evenings and weekends. Anything that requires my attention on a schedule will eventually not get it.
• Real dependents. DNS and home automation failures are household-visible within minutes.
• No cloud escape hatch for the things that matter — the point is that it runs here.

Architecture

A Proxmox node hosts purpose-separated Docker VMs: shared infrastructure (reverse proxy, SSO, metrics, logs, uptime, push notifications), an operational backend (self-hosted Git, CI runners, an append-only event ledger), human-facing knowledge and document apps, and a sandbox for experiments and public demos. A NAS holds persistence and backups and doubles as the second DNS node. A separate GPU workstation runs the local model stack.

Ingress is a single reverse proxy with forward-auth in front of everything internal. DNS runs highly available across two nodes with one-way policy sync from a designated source of truth, so the replica can never drift into being a second opinion.

Everything is Git-backed and Git-first: inventory, compose files, runbooks and decision records live in one repo, and the running fleet is compared against that repo by read-only collectors that change nothing and record their own errors rather than crashing.

Outcome

14 hosts and around 110 containers, documented in 368 markdown pages: 21 architecture decision records, 131 runbooks — including a restore procedure for every stateful service — and postmortems kept honest enough to include the fixes that didn't work.

What I'd do differently

Write the decision records from day one rather than reconstructing them. The expensive part was never the configuration; it was recovering the reasoning behind configuration I had already forgotten. And buy the UPS before the unclean power loss teaches you to.