Home-Lab - Tag - vo.rs

The Home Lab Upgrade Trap: When Good Enough Should Be Good Enough

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

There’s a particular flavour of evening every home-labber knows. The lab is running fine. Everything you actually use is up. And yet you find yourself three tabs deep on a marketplace, comparing the second-hand price of a faster CPU, a bigger NAS, more RAM you do not need, against the box you already own that is, by every honest measure, sufficient. This is the upgrade trap, and it has cost me more money and more weekends than any actual technical failure.

Self-Hosting Is Not Free: Accounting for Your Own Time

Wed, 27 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

We love to tell ourselves a story about self-hosting: cancel the £10/month subscription, run the open-source equivalent at home, and pocket the difference. It’s a satisfying story. It’s also, in cold accounting terms, frequently nonsense — because the one cost we never put on the spreadsheet is the most expensive one we own. Our own time.

I’m not writing this to talk you out of self-hosting. I host more than is sensible, and I’d do it again. But I’ve watched too many people justify a setup on pure financial grounds, then quietly spend forty hours a year keeping it alive while telling themselves they “saved money”. Let’s be honest about the ledger.

eGPU via OCuLink: Adding a Desktop GPU to a Mini PC

Tue, 19 May 2026 16:00:00 +0000

For years the external GPU story was a sad one: Thunderbolt enclosures that cost as much as a mid-range card, ate a third of your bandwidth in overhead, and dropped the link if you breathed on the cable. OCuLink quietly changed that. It’s an external PCIe connector — no protocol translation, just raw PCIe lanes on a cable — and a growing number of mini PCs now ship with a port. I’ve been running a desktop GPU off a palm-sized machine for a few months, and it’s the first eGPU setup I’d actually recommend.

Power Monitoring with Home Assistant: Tracking What Your Home Lab Actually Costs

Fri, 15 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

I used to wave away questions about what my home lab cost to run with a confident “oh, not much”. Then I put a meter on it. The rack idles at 140 watts, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you do the maths: 140W is roughly 1,226 kWh a year, and at my tariff that’s about £370 just to keep the lights blinking. Measuring it didn’t make it cheaper, but it stopped me lying to myself, and it surfaced a couple of genuine surprises.

IPv6 at Home: Why It Matters Now and How to Stop Ignoring It

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Most of us have spent two decades treating IPv6 as someone else’s problem — a thing that exists, that we’ll get round to, that the internet seems to run fine without. Meanwhile it quietly crept onto your network anyway. Your phone is probably using it right now. A large slice of traffic to Google, Netflix and the big CDNs is already IPv6 over your home connection, and you never lifted a finger. The question stopped being “should I enable IPv6” some time ago. It’s now “should I keep pretending the IPv6 that’s already running is something I understand.”

UniFi for the Home Lab: Where It Shines and Where It Doesn't

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0000

UniFi is the gateway drug of home networking. You buy one access point because your ISP router’s Wi-Fi is a disgrace, you marvel at the clean app and the pretty graphs, and eighteen months later you own a gateway, a couple of switches, a rack-mount UPS you didn’t strictly need, and you refer to your hallway cupboard as “the rack.” Ubiquiti has built something genuinely good here — prosumer gear with an enterprise feel at a price that doesn’t require a purchase order. But it is not the right answer for everyone, and the places it falls down are worth knowing before you spend the money.

VLAN Segmentation at Home: Keeping Your Smart Toaster Away from Your NAS

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Here is an uncomfortable fact about most home networks: every device on them can talk to every other device. Your laptop, your phone, your NAS full of irreplaceable photos, and that £25 smart plug running firmware last updated when it left the factory in Shenzhen — they’re all on the same flat subnet, able to reach each other freely. The smart plug has a hardcoded telnet password and a cloud connection you can’t see into. The NAS has everything you care about. On a flat network, the first is one hop from the second.