Cut Yourself Some Slack

Reading time: 2 minutes (360 words)
Author: @pugmiester
Tags: selfhosted , localhosted , network , personal

I’ve come to realise that my homelab setup is getting out of hand. I’m using Proxmox on a second hand Intel NUC to run a handfull of servers and services, some for learning, some for supporting things Mrs P and I use at home. I started trying to document things a few weeks ago and realised it’s just a mess. There are way too many servers and LXC / Docker containers running, each doing a single job that could likely be consolidated onto a couple of well setup virtual hosts to help simplify things.

So, I started trying to make a plan for how I get from where we are to where it seems sensible to be and each time I started I came to the realisation that if I wanted to get to a particular end stage, as the old saying goes, I wouldn’t start from here…

There’s so much stuff I’ve built over the years that needs moving / migrating / rebuilding that it’s become a daughnting task and I just keep putting it off. However, a recent post on Mastodon by Neil Brown reminded me that I’m not running some sort of mision critical, five 9’s service here, I’m running a home lab and a single public facing web server updated about once a month and read by a dozen people at most.

I could take any of these services down for an hour and practically nobody would notice. Heck, if my blog webserver didn’t have a TLS certificate for a day or two while I figured stuff out again, who’s going to complain.

So, here we are. This week I get the added bonus that Mrs P will be working away from home and so I have an opportunity to get things sorted out while I have an extended maintenance window.

If you happen to catch the blog when I’m migrating it over to it’s new home, you might see a missing TLS certificate, or not. That just depends how well I figure things out when I start to get things reorganised.

Enough procrastinating, just get on with it, well once I finish work of course.