> As I've been deliberately moving toward self-hosted computing, under my control, on my home network
Funnily enough, I was once like this but now I have deliberately moved everything to the big cloud providers as I don’t want to deal with the toil of running my own homelab anymore. This is coming from someone who used to have a FreeBSD server with ZFS disks and using jails to run various things like pf, samba, etc. Eventually things would fail and it felt like I was back at work again when all I want to do is drink a cold beer and watch YouTube.
Perhaps I will try again one day as things get easier. For now I am content with having my photos and videos automatically synced up to iCloud/Google Photos.
I tried once or twice in the early 2010s to set up a home server and had a similar experience to what you describe. Stuff would break and I wouldn't want to spend time fixing it.
I think part of the excitement I'm feeling is that the ecosystem today feels way more stable and mature than it did a decade to a decade and a half ago. Home Assistant, Jellyfin, TrueNAS, and a few other things have all pretty much run themselves for me with almost no downtime (other than one blackout that happened while I was traveling and drained my UPS) for the past nine months. There's tinkering to get it all up and running, but way less maintenance than I remember in the past.
I am curious about what your setup was, I have several systems, not sure I would call it a homelab but I rarely have to do anything. I am using Truenas for my ZFS storage and I have a few NUCs to run extra QoL services.
The only time I do anything with this stuff is when I want to upgrade (which is very rare) or add something. My NAS solution is a custom mini-ITX I built 8 years ago which I feel has more than paid for itself. I have long stopped chasing the latest and greatest because most of what has been produced in the last decade is very usable.
Very wary of going cloud, as I can't as easily control costs.
Funnily enough, I was once like this but now I have deliberately moved everything to the big cloud providers as I don’t want to deal with the toil of running my own homelab anymore. This is coming from someone who used to have a FreeBSD server with ZFS disks and using jails to run various things like pf, samba, etc. Eventually things would fail and it felt like I was back at work again when all I want to do is drink a cold beer and watch YouTube.
Perhaps I will try again one day as things get easier. For now I am content with having my photos and videos automatically synced up to iCloud/Google Photos.