I’ve been making some improvements/changes to the homelab, and I would now consider this to be the third iteration of the homelab. In the Dickension tradition, I’ll go through the past, current, and future states of my homelab.
Ghosts of Homelabs Past The first iteration was an ever-growing pile of NUCs running Debian. Initially, the idea was to run Kubernetes orchestrated by Pulumi, but the overall complexity of the system was unmanageable, and I also made some odd architectural decisions, such as writing persistent volume claims to SMB stores (yikes).
Most of the posts on this blog are my opinion. The same can be said of most posts on most blogs. Sometimes, however, I like to write a blog post that does the other thing for which we use the internet: conveying and sharing information. This is one of those blogs (but not the only one)
Homelab 2.0 Historically, my homelab has been a series of NUCs scattered around my house, connected to nodes in my mesh wifi network.
What is this NUC? At the time when I am writing this, there exists on eBay a surfeit of extremely inexpensive NUCs - labelled “NUC5i5MYBE”. I have personally acquired 2 of them, and am using them in my homelab to host, among other things, Gitea, Drone CI, and Uptime Kuma. I could go more into that, but the purpose of this post is to give some details about what exactly these machines are, where they may have come from, and some useful things to know about them.