Practical homelab notes for people slightly past beginner.
I’m figuring out what can be hosted on old thin clients, small PCs and a couple of VPSs — with less hardware, less power and fewer things to break.
Old office PCs, thin clients and a MacBook can be more useful than another impulse purchase.
Purchase price, idle power, noise, maintenance and what happens when it fails.
Home Assistant, an NVR, a backup target or a research agent — not 40 containers for the sake of it.
Backups, simple rollbacks and a clear boundary between home infrastructure and a VPS.
The Dell Wyse J5005: enough for Home Assistant, MQTT and network tools, but not a magic local AI box.
A cautious, staged approach to network segmentation when the house still needs to work tomorrow morning.
Why an i5-11500T, 16 GB of RAM and a couple of drives make a better appliance than another cloud subscription.
Put public, boring and always-on services where they are easiest to keep alive. Keep private experiments closer to home.
Using a small ARM VPS and Crawl4AI for a private research and paper-trading experiment.
What I bought, what I already owned, what I nearly bought, and why “good enough” is often the right answer.
Wyse J5005
Home Assistant candidate
i5-11500T Dell
Future camera NVR
Two VPSs
Public and research workloads
No rack required. No pretending every service needs Kubernetes. Just honest notes about making small, dependable infrastructure work.