Homelab

It’s been a few months since my last update as per usual! I try not to blog for the sake of it so I wait until I have a few things of value to update on.

When I was a kid me and my brother read a lot, we devoured books so much so my mum had to keep taking us to the library to get more. Eventually when we got a bit older we started buying our own books and both our rooms became full of Terry Pratchett, JRR Tolkein and other amazing authors. I love reading it transports me to a better place.

Happy new year homelabbers! I’m cheating a bit and rolling some of the work I got done in December 2025 into this update. I want to say my homelab is pretty boring now it just works which is awesome, only minor tinkering is required these days so I’ve decided to focus on observability for a bit. Knowing when and what things have gone wrong was sorely missing so I’ve finally gotten round to sorting a lot of that out which I’ll detail in a section below.

Spurred on by this great article from Jessica Journals I’ve decided to document how I handle my music collection in 2025/26. I’ve split the post up into what seem like logical sections.

Oh wow how things change in a month! I now have 3.5 homelabs, It’s an odd number but hear me out: OG Proxmox Server Parents Proxmox Server Mediaserver (I don’t classify this as a full lab) New Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 Kubernetes Cluster Migration to Kubernetes # For a while now I’ve wanted my own cluster, I’ve even built a few in Proxmox but none of them have ever stuck around long enough for me to really grow attached to them. For those that don’t know what I do for my day job I manage a k8s cluster with around a 1000 namespaces it’s quite challenging! The problem is I don’t use k8s, I can talk for hours on how our cluster is built and how all the components fit together but I can count on one hand the amount of time I’ve actually deployed any applications to it. I have a hole in my knowledge when it comes to actually using k8s as an end user. Building a physical cluster and migrating my existing apps over to it should hopefully cover that.

Bye bye Ubuntu Server 20.04 # I moved all my apps from Ubuntu Server to Debian 12 after testing it out for a few months. It’s faster and uses less resources. There’s also no snap which is great! Migration went fine it was tedious but gave me an opportunity to clean up some tech debt I’d made when I first set the vm up. Running sudo shutdown -P now was very satisfying. I still have a backup of the vm if I need to restore though.

Potentially a long one this time round. Lot’s of changes/updates/additions to my homelab. I’m also still managing a second homelab for my parents which brings it’s own set of challenges but is a lot of fun.

August/September update on my Homelab

June/July update on my Homelab

Here’s a very quick update on my homelab.