Occasional notes from a small home lab — networking, self-hosting, and other tinkering.
Finally got around to reorganizing the home network cabinet. The old consumer router has been replaced with a small fanless box, VLANs are split between work machines, IoT gadgets and the guest network, and everything is noticeably calmer. Next step: proper monitoring so I can stop guessing which device is saturating the uplink on Saturday evenings.
A backup you have never restored is just a hope. This month I started doing a monthly restore drill: pick one service, rebuild it from backup onto a spare machine, and time the whole process. Two of my scripts had quietly rotted — better to find that out on a quiet Sunday than during a real outage.
Every change to the lab gets one line in a paper notebook: date, what changed, and why. It sounds old-fashioned, but when something breaks at midnight, the notebook is faster than digging through shell history. Digital notes are for detail; the paper log is for the story.