I didn't plan to build a homelab. A dead GPU kind of decided that for me.

It was around 2009. I was living with roommates, working tech support at a call center. Mostly T1 stuff, connectivity issues, basic networking. Nothing glamorous. My desktop died on me, GPU fried, so I fell back to this old HP laptop. The thing had Beats Audio and a DVD drive, which felt fancy at the time.

I traveled a bit back then and didn't want to haul a stack of DVDs everywhere, so I started ripping them to the hard drive. 500GB felt massive. It wasn't. Music, movies, programs, games... it filled up fast, and that problem led me down a rabbit hole I never came back from.

Trying to manage all that media is what introduced me to XBMC, what most people now know as Kodi. Instead of replacing the GPU, I just plugged the desktop straight into the TV and let the iGPU handle output. First HTPC, basically by accident. Ubuntu went on, XBMC went on top of that, and it worked. More importantly, it got me hooked on Linux.

From there I discovered DLNA, the protocol that lets a media server show up and stream across your whole network. That was the moment it stopped being about one device and started being about a network. Eventually I found Plex, and that changed everything.

The media server kept growing. At one point I had three drives attached, no redundancy, no parity, no protection whatsoever. Just drives full of stuff and a prayer. That setup taught me a hard lesson about data, which led me to Unraid. Suddenly I had real parity, real storage management, and I finally understood why it mattered.

For a while I ran two machines: Unraid handling storage, and the original Linux box still connected to the TV running Plex. Then Unraid got native Docker support, I moved Plex over, and consolidated back to one machine. The old desktop finally got retired.

But the more I learned, the more I wanted to do. Static IPs. SMB shares. Managed switches. UPS units. Mini PCs. Each thing I added taught me something new, and each thing I learned made me want to add something else.

Where the lab stands today

Danitza is my main Unraid server. Grandfathered Pro license, eight drives ranging from 3TB to 6TB with dual parity, about 36TB usable. It runs Plex, the full arr stack (Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr), Transmission, Tautulli, Audiobookshelf, Mealie, Pinchflat, and Komga. All the media lives here.

DanitzaNAS is a Terramaster box in RAID5 with about 10.8TB usable. Cold storage, backups, day-to-day files. I've got it mounted remotely on my MacBook through Tailscale and on the desktop over LAN.

tonycorev2 is a Dell OptiPlex 3050 running Ubuntu 24.04. This one's my home server. It handles Home Assistant, Frigate NVR, Mosquitto MQTT, Portainer, a NUT UPS server managing two CyberPower units, and four separate web projects running PHP/nginx/MySQL in Docker, including the time tracker I ended up building myself.

tony-ubuntu is my main workstation. Ryzen 5 5500, 32GB RAM, GTX 1070, three drives. This is where I work and tinker daily.

JARVIS is a Lenovo laptop running Windows 11, repurposed as a headless remote access node. (That conversion deserves its own post — and got one.)

MacBook Pro is my portable daily driver when I'm not at the desk.

The whole network runs on Meraki gear. MX67 router, MS120-24P switch, MR33 access point. Everything ties together over Tailscale so I can reach any machine from anywhere.

That's the lab as it stands today. What started as not wanting to carry DVDs on a trip turned into a Meraki-managed network, multiple servers, 36TB of storage, a NVR system watching the house, and a home automation setup that's always one project away from being "done."

This blog is going to be about that journey. The stuff I'm building, breaking, fixing, and learning along the way. No polished tutorials, just real notes from someone who figures things out the hard way.