A long Saturday in the homelab

Spent most of today catching up on homelab work I'd been putting off. Started with one small problem and ended up touching almost everything.

Fixed the backup server first. Some leftover wiring from a recent migration meant names resolved on one machine but not another. Once I traced the actual path the data was taking, the fix was simple. The symptoms made it look like ten different problems instead of one.

Rebuilt a small piece of infrastructure that had quietly stopped working after a hardware migration. The original copy didn't survive the move. Spinning up a fresh one took less time than debugging would have.

Finished setting up offsite backups. I'd been telling myself for weeks that I was almost done. Today I actually finished. Encrypted, scheduled, tested. Watching the first upload tick along was satisfying in a way I didn't expect.

Moved the photo library off a small local disk and onto the storage server. No longer a single point of failure, now covered by the same offsite backup chain as everything else. Set up the phone app to auto-upload new pictures so I'm not relying on Google for anything anymore. The phone is the camera, the server is the library.

Rolled out automatic security patches across every Linux machine in the hypervisor.

Reduced the iGPU memory allocation in the BIOS on both compute nodes. Saved a couple gigs of RAM each. Live-migrated services off, rebooted, migrated back. Cluster shrugged and kept going.

Set up encrypted cloud backups for a separate dataset on the storage server. Different bucket, different password, different threat model. Verified the upload works. Test restore is tomorrow.

And got this blog up and running. Been on my someday list. Today became someday.

Planning to write about the stuff I make here. Pasta, sourdough, garden stuff, fermentation, homelab projects, whatever I'm into that week. The name is on the door.

More soon.