I'm currently building out my homelab, and one of my main goals is to establish a solid foundation that won't require constant maintenance or rebuilding down the road.

I see a lot of people spending significant amounts of time working on their homelabs, and I'm curious how much of that is because they enjoy tinkering versus actually needing to fix or maintain things.

For those who have been running a homelab for several years:

• What takes up most of your maintenance time?
• What tends to break or require the most troubleshooting?
• Are updates a common source of problems?
• What would you do differently if you were starting over?
• Have you managed to get your homelab to a point where it mostly runs itself?

I'm trying to learn from others' experiences so I can avoid unnecessary complexity and build something reliable from the beginning.

Ultimately, I'd like to spend more time using my homelab than maintaining it.