I thought homelabbing was gonna be easy

I started as an electronics engineer, then an SLM 3D printing engineer, a sysadmin, and now a consultant. I figured those skills would help, but its been a lot harder and more expensive than I though.

Especially networking, cybersecurity, and getting a reliable software stack together. Theres always something else to figure out.

Here's the hardware. The diagram shows what everything runs:

• Raptor: i5-13500, 32 GB RAM, 5 × 26 TB HDDs in RAIDZ1, and 2 × 2 TB NVMe in a mirror.

• Jelly: i9-10900K, 32 GB RAM, RTX 3060 12 GB, seven data HDDs plus two parity drives, and mirrored NVMe storage.

• Bee: Beelink GTR9 Pro, Ryzen AI Max+ 395, 128 GB unified RAM, and 2 TB NVMe.

• Pis: Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB RAM and an Orange Pi 3B.

• Networking: UniFi UCG-Fiber, Lite 16 PoE, Flex Mini, and U6 Enterprise.…