$ cat /etc/motd
Two used mini PCs from a corporate refurb lot. Four Raspberry Pis from a Kubernetes project I abandoned in a weekend. A NAS I saved for. A little networking gear picked up over time. Nothing new, nothing expensive, nothing bought all at once.
From that pile: a running homelab. Two Proxmox hypervisors, nine Debian VMs, four Pis running DNS / home automation / a general-purpose workhorse. Ansible on WSL (a Linux terminal inside Windows) keeps it from rotting.
If you're staring at some old hardware wondering whether it's enough to start with — yes it is. Start here.
$ ls /blog // read in order — each post assumes the previous one
Two used mini PCs from a corporate refurb lot, four Raspberry Pis from a Kubernetes project that never happened, and a NAS I saved for. Every decision I made along the way — Proxmox, Debian, Ansible — and why.
How I took two refurbed office desktops and made them into the two-node Proxmox setup that runs every VM in my homelab. Why refurbs, why not full HA, and every gotcha I hit installing PVE for the first time — so you don't.
Three years ago I bought Raspberry Pis 'to learn Kubernetes' and never opened the boxes. This is what I did with them once I finally admitted that wasn't happening — and the repeatable baseline that means I never have to think about Pi setup again.
$ cat /etc/naysync/rack.conf // what all of it ended up being
[hypervisors] ; used i5-6th-gen mini PCs, cheap refurb lot pve1 ; proxmox host pve2 ; proxmox host [vms] ; debian 13 trixie, docker on all except pbs monitor ; prometheus + grafana + loki + alerts pbs ; proxmox backup server 4.x → nightly to NAS postgresql ; postgres + timescaledb jenkins ; ci for personal projects amd64-1 ; general-purpose docker host jellyfin ; media server (ubuntu 24.04 lxc) torrenter ; pins through vpn-gateway vpn-gateway ; openvpn tunnel provider server ; side-project stack, isolated [pis] ; 3× pi 4b 2gb, 1× pi 4b 8gb — the "abandoned project" set pihole-p ; primary dns (pi-hole + unbound) pihole-s ; secondary dns — the "no household outage" insurance hass ; home assistant, boots from USB-SSD arm64-1 ; general-purpose ARM64 [control] ansible from WSL on my laptop one repo, ~30 playbooks, ~20 roles [what-it-does] ad-blocking DNS the whole house uses self-hosted media server on every TV home automation that won't get acquired backups I can actually verify observability so I can see what's breaking [uptime] target = "good enough" policy = one machine at a time; critical stuff gated by health checks