My home lab, 2026 edition

This is a low-effort writeup of what is actually running at home right now. It is small, and that is the point — the lab exists to be useful, not to be a second job.

Hardware

• One low-power mini PC as the main node.
• A managed switch, mostly for VLAN practice.
• An old laptop standing in as a console.

Services

The list is deliberately short: a reverse proxy, a couple of containers, a backup job, and a small monitoring agent. Everything else is something I removed and do not miss.

reverse-proxy   listens :443, routes by hostname
containers      notes, git, a tiny status page
backup          nightly, to two destinations
monitoring      uptime + disk + temperature

What changed this year

I moved from “install everything” to “install as little as possible.” Fewer moving parts means fewer 2 a.m. surprises. The single most useful addition was honest monitoring: knowing what is normal makes it obvious when something is not.

Every service you run is a small promise to maintain it later.

Next on the list: nothing. That is also a feature.