Notes from a small home lab
A year ago I picked up two second-hand mini PCs for the price of a decent dinner. They sit behind the monitor, draw about fifteen watts each, and quietly do more than I expected.
What runs on them
A local file share, a small media library, a DNS filter for the whole flat and a handful of scheduled jobs. Everything is boring on purpose: plain packages, plain config files, a text file listing what I changed and why.
What I would do differently
Label the cables on day one. Write the restore steps before the first backup, not after. And resist the urge to install something just because it looks fun — every service is one more thing to update.
$ uptime up 61 days, load average: 0.04, 0.06, 0.05