Homelab

Most of what I run at home is available as a subscription. That's the point. Renting a service teaches you its UI; running it teaches you its failure modes — what happens when the disk fills, when the container won't come back after a reboot, when DNS is the problem again.

That knowledge shows up directly in client work. When an ERP integration stalls, the question is never "which vendor do I call" — it's storage, network, auth, or the application, and I've debugged all four on my own hardware at 11pm.

What runs on it

• Storage. TrueNAS with ZFS — snapshots, scheduled scrubs, and a backup strategy I've actually restored from, not just configured.
• Containers. A Docker stack for everything else, defined as compose files so a rebuild is a checkout and an up, not an archaeology project.
• Media. The usual self-hosted media chain, which doubles as the stress test for storage throughput.
• Automation agents. Where the eBay listing pipeline and other side projects live.
• Networking. VPN for remote access, so none of the above needs a port open to the internet.

Operating rules

• Configuration lives in files, not in a UI I'll forget I clicked.
• Anything I'd miss gets a tested restore path, not just a backup job.
• If a service needs babysitting more than once, it gets fixed or removed.