#leadership #learning #reflection

During my last vacation I got some unexpected problems in my home lab. The setup, powered by Debian 11, ran the services my family needs reliably for the last 5 years. But it suddenly started having problems, because something got messed up during a PHP update. Short look in the logs didn't surface anything, so while I was on vacation I had to restart the server every 2 days, in order to bring it back to the functional state. After I came back home, I invested multiple hours trying to figure out the root cause. It was really trial and error, because I couldn't pin it down. So after some time I decided to shut the services down, and rebuild everything from scratch using Docker. It took me shorter than expected to bring the services up again, but longer than I thought, to stabilize them 🙂.

So was the invested time worth it? I believe it was, and it brought me more than just a self-hosted setup that respects the privacy rules I want to enforce for family pictures, calendars etc.