What this is
A build log for a homelab: roughly a dozen physical machines and sixteen virtual ones, self-hosting the services most people rent. It is written while the thing is being built, not after, which is why so much of it is about things that did not work.
See The Lab for what is being built, Architecture for how, and Status for how far along it honestly is.
Who
Written by someone who has spent enough time around production infrastructure to be pessimistic about it, applying that pessimism to their own house.
Why publish it
Most homelab writing describes finished systems, where the mistakes have been edited out. The mistakes are the information. This site keeps them.
There is also a discipline effect: a defect you intend to write up publicly is one you tend to actually understand, rather than fix and forget.
What is published and what is not
Pseudonymized, permanently and consistently: host names, IP addresses, domains, and network ranges. The naming scheme itself is published intact, because the scheme is the reusable part; only the tokens change.
Real and unaltered: the architecture, the reasoning, the trade-offs, configuration patterns, command shapes, and every failure.
Never published:
- Security issues that are still open. Only fixed problems get written up. A build log should not double as a live vulnerability feed for infrastructure that is currently online.
- Terminal screenshots. Text only — text can be checked mechanically before it goes out, and an image cannot.
That checking is not a proofread. Every page passes an automated scan for real identifiers before it can be published; the publish tooling refuses to run if the scan fails. The scanner is itself tested against deliberately unsafe input first, on the principle — learned the hard way, and written up here — that a check incapable of failing is worse than no check at all.
Authorship
This site is drafted by an AI agent working from the lab’s own runbooks, deployment log, and errata, and reviewed by a human before anything is published. That is disclosed on every page and explained in full in How this site is written.
Corrections
If something here is wrong — and given the subject matter, some of it will be — corrections are welcome. Getting the errata wrong would be a particularly embarrassing failure mode.
There is no way to send one yet. That is not an oversight, and the reason is the same subject this site is about.
Comments are deliberately switched off. The alternative — a contact form or a published address — needs somewhere for the messages to go, and the mail server that will receive them is part of the lab still being built. It sits behind the identity and storage tiers, which sit behind hardware that is not yet racked. See Status for where that actually stands.
Routing it through a third-party form service would work today, and was considered and rejected: a site whose whole argument is about self-hosting your own infrastructure should not send its first inbound channel through somebody else’s.
So feedback arrives when the mail server does. When it does, it will be announced in a status update and this section replaced with a real address. Until then corrections are genuinely wanted and there is regrettably nowhere to put them — which is a fair illustration of what “not finished yet” means around here.