I thought I had a good homelab – Human Paradox - Colin's Blog
I thought I had a good homelab
05 Jul, 2026
I'll never forget my first homelab. It was an Apple Xserve G5. I had "bought" it from a non-profit organization I was volunteering for. They had decided to re-do their website, and as a 15-16 year old, I helped them make it savvy for the new, younger generation. They had the Xserve in their basement, for who knows how long, never used as they had always wound up outsourcing their web stack.
I always thought I should have stuck legs on it, replaced the top with acrylic, and made it into a coffee table. As a piece of equipment, it was stunningly beautiful. Gorgeous aluminum, curved edges, satisfying physical interactions like click drive bays in. As a piece of technology it was awful - Apple had virtually no ecosystem for servers, and of course, it was PowerPC. I had no idea what PowerPC was until I got it, and then I had to go digging around for PPC support, settling on Ubuntu 12.04 PPC. That was enough to get a basic LAMP stack going, and I made a couple of websites, including the original humanparadox.org.
(Ignore the sophomoric philosophizing, I didn't know any better). I also hosted blackfalcons.net, which was a website for our airsoft team. As a 16 year old that knew how to spin up websites on self-hosted hardware, I was pretty cool.
This kicked off a homelab tradition that I still have, 16 years later. I eventually realized the limitations of PowerPC, as well as the 1U form factor, and switched over to two Dell Optiplexes (Optiplodes?) that I purchased for $60/each at UConn's surplus sales. On these I migrated from the traditional LAMP stack to begin tinkering with Docker. Well, first it was Sandstorm.io but I quickly hit limitations with this, and wanted to do more, so I checked under the hood found this "Docker" thing. At the time I was hosting the progenitor of this blog, NextCloud, Bitwarden, and eventually some other services like Funkwhale or whatever caught my fancy.
Those Optiplexes, and Docker, came with me when, after college I moved across the country to go to graduate school at Montana State University. There I lived in tiny Bozeman apartments, 400-600 square feet, so one might imagine that I'd stick with the Optiplexes. However, never one to turn down a bad decision, I had gotten involved with a lab setting up a cryo-EM facility that had a requirement for server-style compute density, plus it was COVID and I was bored, and I had just discovered LabGopher (RIP in peace), so I took the plunge and decided to learn enterprise grade hardware. Oh, and my rent included electricity.
I'm still not sure how I fit everything in the closet, or how my wife didn't divorce me over the heat and noise, but at its pinnacle, I had 2x R710s, an R720xd, an R730, plus 10Gbit SFP+ networking through a some Dell 1U switch with 4 add-in 10Gbit SFP+ cards that got molten lava hot. Originally this all resided within a wooden server rack a friend helped me build, but eventually I bought a ~40U rack from a shifty Russian guy who had about 20 servers in his apartment and was extremely tight lipped about what he was doing with them.
What was I doing with all this, besides turning electricity into noise and heat? Well, I was still hosting NextCloud. But now I was really juicing it up, with 20+ TB of NAS that I'd never fill up. And I got more and more into services. WebDAV, Unified Push eventually, Matrix server plus about a thousand bridges (what a headache). Game servers. Roon. Octoprint. Home Assistant. But more importantly, I was learning - learning server/enterprise grade hardware, enterprise level compute, MPI, RDMA, and SLURM. And I was able to use all those to put together a sophisticated compute setup for the MSU Cryo-EM Facility that eventually differentiated really quite strongly on that entire compute/storage flow - I later wrote it up. For an investment that came out to $1000-$2000 worth of used gear, and a lot of cut fingers wrestling it into the closet, well worth it. It's tough to really quantify what an advantage this level of comfort with Linux, Proxmox, HA, HPC, and networking has been in my young career, but it has been a massive, massive advantage. On top of every single skill I ever learned, was the ability to scale it or multiply it or automate it.
But then it happened. My son came along. I had neither the time (what little time I had I was spending hunting/fishing/archery anyways) or space. It was time to let go, and so I did, selling what I could, and then donating the rest to friends that were interested. Honestly, it was such a fun hobby and my enjoyment of it really peaked with the multi-node enterprise gear setup. I picked up a Synology and decided I was done. I'd still have NextCloud, Home Assistant, and Bitwarden, but everything would wind down and I had entered the "Home network appliance" phase of my life.
...or so I thought.
I quickly bounced off the limitations of the...