Building My Home Lab
OwnCloud, Jellyfin, and a pile of monitoring dashboards — how a secondhand PC and an old Raspberry Pi became my de-googled little corner of the internet.
I've spent the last few months pulling my digital life out of other people's clouds and onto hardware I actually own — call it de-googling, call it data self-sufficiency, call it mild paranoia. Either way, I wanted a setup where I own my own stuff.
The hardware is nothing fancy: a secondhand PC I picked up cheap, plus an old Raspberry Pi that had been sitting in a drawer since some half-finished project years ago.
Here's what's running so far:
None of it's fancy, and it's probably not "best practice" — but it's mine, and I understand every piece of it. Lately I've also started scripting the setup instead of clicking through it by hand: home-lab-IaaC, my Terraform + Ansible repo. Today's commit added a playbook to run apt updates across every host in the lab, not just the ones Terraform manages.
This is a living project — consider this post entry one in what's probably going to be an ongoing series.