Occasional notes on homelabs, networking, and keeping small systems alive.
After three years of "temporary" cabling, I finally tore the rack down and rebuilt it over a weekend. Shorter patch leads, a proper brush panel, and labels on both ends of everything. The switches run noticeably cooler now that the cable nest is gone — a reminder that airflow is a feature, not an accident.
Disk pressure forced the question every small operator eventually faces: which logs actually earn their keep? I kept authentication events, DHCP leases, and SMART summaries. Everything else went to a seven-day rotation. The box has been quieter and, honestly, I have not missed a single dropped log line.
Serving DNS for a handful of personal domains is unfashionable in the age of free anycast, but it is still the fastest way to learn how the system really behaves — zone transfers, negative caching, and all. A few hard-won lessons inside, mostly about TTLs I set too long in 2023 and regretted ever since.
A restore you have never tested is a hope, not a backup. Once a quarter I pick a random snapshot and rebuild it on spare hardware. It takes an hour. Twice now it has caught a silent failure that monitoring alone would never have shown me.