👨‍💻 About Me

In my homelab journey post, I mentioned how my self-hosted adventure began with solving a simple problem. Since then, I’ve zigzagged between hosting services at home and using VPS providers. This has given me a nuanced perspective on the eternal homelab question: should you self-host at home or rent a VPS?

Learning Objectives Uber Alles

Before we dive into comparison metrics, there’s an important personal bias I have: if your primary goal is to learn a specific technology, that objective trumps all other considerations.

The Beginning: Scratching an Itch

My homelab journey didn’t start with grand ambitions. It began with the desire to watch TV on my netbook (remember those?), when I was bored in computing classes at high school and 6th form. Ever the stringent professional, I know… This was back in the days where Netflix would send out DVDs, and the little netbook didn’t have a DVD drive! I did, however, have one of those old school Mac Minis with a DVD drive. That meant I had options. I could watch the DVDs, great, but when I was away from home? Zilch.

I believe that when more people understand technology, companies providing technology services will be held to a higher standard. So, in service of that, here’s my pitch to get you to start a homelab!

What is a Homelab?

At its core, a homelab is a safe place to experiment. With hardware, software, networking, and even dealing with angry users when your recipes app isn’t accessible and your significant other really needs the next step for that chili!

This one’s a slight philsophical break.

I’ve been on a few different journeys since the last post on this blog… 2 different jobs, consulting work, and then starting my own company with a long term friend and now business partner!

I figured I’d start out with a bit of a shower thought I had. I’d like to occasionally take this blog in a direction of more philosophical thinkery, because that’s always been another interest of mine. I was considering a hypothetical scenario whereby someone whom you’re supposed to respect and whom you want to respect (think: family-in-law, boss, government official), does something untoward. Something that could be addressed with Hanlon’s razor - “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Within an article on their website, LinuxServer.io have announced that they will be deprecating the current linuxserver/unifi-controller public image as of 2024/01/01. Happy New Year! The README on the current tooling that I imagine most are using mentions a direct upgrade if you were using the mongoless tag which, due to what’s colloquially known as “Sod’s Law”, I am not.

On the new repo as well as the DockerHub page, the docs currently have a brief mentioning of requiring an external MongoDB instance but the code snippits don’t actuall have one… This seemed a little problematic, and after migrating my setup last night, figured I’d include a quick walkthrough.