Fri 19 September 2025
tags: homelab
The last year and a half has been busy, and most of it hasn't been lab related. I've been filling my time with other hobbies, and mainly been running in maintenance mode rather than trying to spin up new things. I expect that to change over the winter, as a lot of what I've been doing has been outdoors and will have to take a break when snow comes. Until then, this is just a quick recap to hopefully get some momentum going.
Nextcloud is still running, somehow. I managed to successfully update it three full versions, which is surprising given how often it errored out in the past. The secret? Using the CLI rather than the web installer. As it turns out, the web installer is just buggy and broken, but doing it via CLI has been more robust and reliable every time. I haven't had issues with any of the apps/plugins upgrading alongside the main install, so I figure I'm good so far. I tried using Nextcloud to host a photo drop for the wedding, but unfortunately that just didn't pan out for multiple reasons. Other than that, it's still serving my needs relatively well.
I did figure out the networking issues I had. As usual, it was user error. Somehow, when I set up networking for the LXC container hosting Nextcloud, I failed to set up a gateway. The entire time I was struggling to reach services, it was because they couldn't complete any outbound communications. That error has been fixed and port forwarding works as expected now.
I haven't made much progress working with containers. The networking component seems to be the biggest problem, and I expect that it's something that I could work around if I managed to set up VLANs. I attempted to run a container for Caddy, but I'm fairly certain that the container network just couldn't properly route the traffic elsewhere. I could be wrong about it, but we'll see in a bit.
As for networking, I gave up on the 5 port managed switch I was using, and I've moved to a Cisco Catalyst 9200L that I got from work. It had been written off as water-damaged due to an accident (the floor above us had a leak that went straight into our network closet), so either I took it or it would go to the trash. Right now I'm just using it because it has 48 ports, but I'm slowly building out VLANs so I can move the lab to its own network. Once that's done, I can set up proper DNS and DHCP, which should allow me to reference hosts by FQDN/hostname rather than by their private IP address. Following tutorials and replacing hostnames with IPs has felt pretty clunky and makes me feel amateurish, so I'm hoping that this setup will make life easier.
All of that is just hopeful planning for the future. I've been frustrated by VLANs before, so I don't really trust that everything will work as expected now. Still, having more ports might make this easier, but who knows?
As for the other hobbies, I might start talking about one of them here soon-ish. It's blacksmithing! I've been wanting to get into the hobby since I was 11 or 12, possibly earlier, so finally having a small setup of my own is a dream come true. I took a class on it back in 2023, then didn't do anything until I got a single-burner propane forge last Christmas. Between that and a 65 lb railroad track anvil my dad gave me, I have a workshop that I can wheel and carry out to a grill area that I'm allowed to use. I'm still amateurish, and most of my projects are pretty simple, but I may post a bit here while I continue to experiment with hot metal. I only have a few months left to get stuff done before it gets too snowy, so I'll probably spend more time working than writing, but who knows?
It's been a busy year and a half, and with any luck the next few years will be just as full.