Yeah good luck with that one.
I ran a home lab for a number of years. This was a fairly extensive set up - 4 rack mount servers, UPS, ethernet switch etc with LTO backups. Did streaming, email and file storage for the whole family as well as my own experiments.
One morning I woke up to a dead node. The DMZ service node. I found this out because my wife had no internet. It was running the NAT and email too. Some swapping of power supplies later and I found the whole thing was a complete brick. Board gone. It's 07:45 and my wife can't check her schedule and I'm still trying to get 3 kids out of the door.
At that point I realised I'd fucked up by running a home lab. I didn't have the time or redundancy to have anyone rely on me.
I dug the ISP's provided WiFi router out, plugged it in and configured it quickly and got her laptop and phone working on it. Her email was down but she could check calendar etc (on icloud). By the end of the day I'd moved all the family email off to fastmail and fixed everything to talk to the ISP router properly. I spent the next year cleaning up the shit that was on those servers and found out that between us we only had about 300 gig of data worth keeping which was distributed out to individual macbooks and everyone is responsible for backing their own stuff up (time machine makes this easy). Eventually email was moved to icloud as well when domains came along.
I burned 7TB of crap, sold all the kit and never ran a home lab again. Then I realised I didn't have to pay for the energy, the hardware or expend the time running it. There are no total outages and no problems if there's a power failure. The backups are simple, cheap and reliable. I don't even have a NAS now - I just bought everyone some Samsung T7 shield disks.
I have a huge weight off my shoulders and more free time and money. I didn't learn anything I wouldn't have learned at work anyway.
I ran a home lab for a number of years. This was a fairly extensive set up - 4 rack mount servers, UPS, ethernet switch etc with LTO backups. Did streaming, email and file storage for the whole family as well as my own experiments.
One morning I woke up to a dead node. The DMZ service node. I found this out because my wife had no internet. It was running the NAT and email too. Some swapping of power supplies later and I found the whole thing was a complete brick. Board gone. It's 07:45 and my wife can't check her schedule and I'm still trying to get 3 kids out of the door.
At that point I realised I'd fucked up by running a home lab. I didn't have the time or redundancy to have anyone rely on me.
I dug the ISP's provided WiFi router out, plugged it in and configured it quickly and got her laptop and phone working on it. Her email was down but she could check calendar etc (on icloud). By the end of the day I'd moved all the family email off to fastmail and fixed everything to talk to the ISP router properly. I spent the next year cleaning up the shit that was on those servers and found out that between us we only had about 300 gig of data worth keeping which was distributed out to individual macbooks and everyone is responsible for backing their own stuff up (time machine makes this easy). Eventually email was moved to icloud as well when domains came along.
I burned 7TB of crap, sold all the kit and never ran a home lab again. Then I realised I didn't have to pay for the energy, the hardware or expend the time running it. There are no total outages and no problems if there's a power failure. The backups are simple, cheap and reliable. I don't even have a NAS now - I just bought everyone some Samsung T7 shield disks.
I have a huge weight off my shoulders and more free time and money. I didn't learn anything I wouldn't have learned at work anyway.