It started with an Ubuntu VM.
There is always one more service.
My descent into the bottomless pit of homelabbing.
This is where I keep track of what I built, what I tried, what broke, what I learned, what I changed my mind about, and all the rabbit holes I fell into along the way.
This isn't meant to be a tutorial or a polished guide. It's the story of my homelab as it evolves — including the mistakes, questionable decisions, and "while I'm here, I might as well..." moments.
🤖 Generated automatically: The latest entries from across the pit.
| Type | # | Date | Entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥️ Home Display | HD001 |
2026-09-22 | I just wanted the photos somewhere we could see them |
| 📖 Diary | 0011 |
2026-09-22 | The VM was never supposed to become a server |
| 🚨 Incident | II02 |
2026-09-20 | Kopia woke up before the clock |
🔎 Looking for something?
Ctrl+F/⌘Fyour way through, or head straight to the full index.
There are a few different ways things end up documented here.
The main story.
Follow the homelab from the first Ubuntu VM through everything I built, added, changed, learned, and probably didn't need.
Things that broke without being invited to.
Outages, failures, unexpected behaviour, and those moments when the infrastructure decides it would also like to contribute to the diary.
Problems that became investigations of their own.
The rabbit holes involving cables, networking, configuration, documentation, questionable assumptions, and eventually — hopefully — an explanation.
🧪 Projects
Things that refused to fit into a single diary entry.
Longer-running builds, experiments, designs and enhancements that keep evolving while the main diary moves on.
The pit currently looks roughly like this:
This is deliberately a snapshot rather than a specification.
The homelab keeps changing. That's rather the point.
homelabbing-pit/ ├── diary/ │ ├── README.md # where the story starts │ ├── entries/ # the main descent │ ├── incidents/ # things broke │ ├── troubleshooting/ # why did that happen? │ └── projects/ # things that kept growing │ ├── architecture/ # diagrams and architecture snapshots ├── assets/ # images and other repository assets ├── scripts/ # keeping the pit organised └── telemetry/ # the pit is talking to the world
The indexes under diary/ are generated automatically from the metadata in each entry.
The stories themselves are very much written by a human who probably should have stopped adding services several containers ago.
Not really.
There are ideas.
There are plans.
There are things I definitely don't need.
And there is an alarming amount of overlap between those three categories.
Still digging. ⛏️
Looking for something specific?
This is the complete index of everything documented in the pit.
🤖 Generated automatically: This index is rebuilt from repository metadata.
| Type | # | Date | Entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥️ Home Display | HD001 |
2026-09-22 | I just wanted the photos somewhere we could see them |
| 📖 Diary | 0011 |
2026-09-22 | The VM was never supposed to become a server |
| 🚨 Incident | II02 |
2026-09-20 | Kopia woke up before the clock |
| 📖 Diary | 0010 |
2026-09-19 | I should probably manage the host too |
| 📖 Diary | 0009 |
2026-09-18 | Do I need a NAS? |
| 📖 Diary | 0008 |
2026-09-17 | The homelab needs a screen |
| 🔧 Troubleshooting | TS01 |
2026-09-16 | I just wanted Ethernet in the living room |
| 📖 Diary | 0007 |
2026-09-16 | My photos live here now |
| 📖 Diary | 0006 |
2026-09-15 | I should probably back this up |
| 📖 Diary | 0005 |
2026-09-14 | I wanted a dashboard |
| 🚨 Incident | II01 |
2026-09-13 | Well, that didn't take long |
| 📖 Diary | 0004 |
2026-09-13 | Is everything still alive? |
| 📖 Diary | 0003 |
2026-09-12 | I only wanted the warning to go away |
| 📖 Diary | 0002 |
2026-09-11 | Okay, but what do I actually host? |
| 📖 Diary | 0001 |
2026-09-10 | It started with an Ubuntu VM |