The lab that has to be useful
The homelab hosts media services, automation, monitoring, and other small systems. Proxmox provides the VM and container foundation. Networking and service boundaries matter as much as the individual applications.
The media stack is one part of it: playback, requests, and background processing each have their own job. Keeping those responsibilities legible makes it easier to understand a failure without restarting everything.
Operating questions
- Which services need public access, and which should stay private?
- What happens when storage or a network dependency is unavailable?
- Can a backup be found and restored when the dashboard is down?
- Does an alert lead to a useful action, or just another notification?
What belongs in the public archive
I keep architecture decisions and recovery notes here, with private network details removed. The gallery image is an illustration; actual hardware photos and a documented restore test are still missing.