The HomeLab Journey Started Like This
Last year, I bought a Mac Studio to replace my six-year-old desktop. The desktop had started on Windows 10 but I’d switched it to Ubuntu before moving back to Mac. Rather than get rid of it, I turned it into a homelab — a playground for SQL practice and learning DevOps.
I started off playing around with Proxmox, then scrapped it to try TrueNAS Scale. TrueNAS wasn’t the right fit for my goals, so I reloaded Proxmox. In this first iteration, I had running:
- Pi-hole
- Home Assistant
- Puppet
- Postgres
- SQL Server
- Wazuh
- An attempt at Prometheus
That’s a lot for one old desktop. Then I got into Terraform and decided I wanted to automate all of it, which is how I fell into the IaC rabbit hole.
Round Two
Last summer, work was shutting down a datacenter. I asked what the plan was for the equipment and was told it was heading to recycling. I mentioned what I was doing, and one of the infrastructure guys who lives nearby brought me three servers. This is where my wife’s eye rolls started — it looked a lot like the gif above.
I set one of the servers up in my office, put Proxmox on it, clustered it with the desktop, and started moving VMs around. All was good, for about three days.
After a while of tinkering with Puppet and Ansible, my inner monologue had an idea:
“Let’s just rebuild all of this with IaC tooling and put everything into source control. Once that’s done, I can CI/CD the whole thing…”
— My inner monologue
My Inner Monologue, the Idiot
I happily followed the voice of my inner monologue and wiped everything to start fresh — rebuilding it all using IaC, CI/CD, and source control. I thought I could do this in a couple of weeks. If you’re laughing, I understand. I deserve it. A couple of weeks turned into a couple of months of scattered approaches before I finally walked away.
So we’re now on HomeLab v2. Spoiler: v2 also went sideways — see Trashed My Proxmox Host for how that went.
Key Takeaways
- Start small in a homelab. Running Pi-hole, Home Assistant, Puppet, Postgres, SQL Server, Wazuh, and Prometheus on a single old desktop is a great way to learn why scoping matters.
- “I’ll rebuild it all with IaC in two weeks” is a classic overestimation — factor in learning time, not just implementation time.
- Free servers from a datacenter teardown are a gift. The eye rolls from your spouse are the price.
- IaC for a homelab is absolutely worth doing; just don’t try to do it all at once while also learning the tools.