Rebuilding my home lab on a single mini PC
For four years my lab was three machines: a tower that did the heavy lifting, a fanless box for DNS and backups, and a Raspberry Pi that mostly existed to make the other two look busy. Two of them drew 11 W at idle each. The tower idled at 38 W and spiked past 120 W whenever anything interesting happened.
I replaced all three with a single N100 mini PC, 16 GB of RAM, two NVMe slots. The whole thing idles at 7 W with the disks spun down and peaks around 24 W under a real workload. My electricity is not expensive, but the noise was the thing that actually changed my life. There is no longer a fan I can hear from the hallway.
What survived the cull
- DNS in a container, because resolver downtime is felt instantly.
- Nightly backups to an external disk plus an offsite copy. Non-negotiable.
- A metrics stack small enough to read in one screen.
What I dropped: the CI runner (moved to a rented box), the media server (my laptop plays files fine), and the Kubernetes cluster. That last one hurt, and it should not have. It was a learning environment pretending to be production.
The part I got wrong
I assumed one machine meant one failure domain, so everything had to be recoverable from a cold disk. True, but I then spent two weekends writing restore scripts instead of using the machine. The lesson repeats itself every few years: the backup you have tested is the only backup you have, and the lab you actually use is the only lab worth maintaining.