Home
The Fat Hacker
Professional Homelab Arsonist & Infrastructure Demolition Expert
Welcome to my digital disaster zone, where uptime is measured in minutes and “production” is just a fancy word for “please don’t look at the logs.”
About Me
I’m The Fat Hacker, and I’ve successfully transformed a perfectly good spare bedroom into what can only be described as a fire hazard with network connectivity. My homelab journey began with noble intentions: learning enterprise technologies, running my own services, and achieving digital independence.
What I got instead was a power bill that rivals a small data center, neighbors who complain about the heat radiating through the walls, and an intimate understanding of why enterprise support contracts exist.
Current Infrastructure Status
🔥 Uptime: Measured in “hours since last kernel panic” 💸 Monthly Power Bill: Classified (I don’t want to talk about it) 🌡️ Room Temperature: “Uncomfortably warm” to “Swedish sauna” 📊 Backup Status: “I’ll get to that this weekend” (since 2022) 🔧 Configuration Management: Notepad.txt and hope
Notable Achievements
- Successfully Dockerized Everything - Including things that should never be containerized
- Mastered Kubernetes - By which I mean I got pods running once before everything mysteriously failed
- Built a Redundant Storage Array - Now twice as likely to lose data
- Implemented “High Availability” - Both servers fail simultaneously, but consistently
- Created Comprehensive Documentation - It’s in one of these tabs, I swear
- Automated Deployments - They automatically fail at 3 AM
- Network Segmentation - Mostly unintentional due to configuration mistakes
The Homelab Horror Stories
The Great Port Forward Incident That time I exposed my entire internal network to the internet because I couldn’t remember which port was which. Shodan found it before I did.
RAID is not a Backup Learned this valuable lesson when three drives decided to form a union and strike simultaneously. My NAS now has trust issues.
The Docker Compose Stack of Shame
47 containers running on a single host, each with restart: always, all competing for 8GB of RAM. It’s not dead, it’s just swapping.
Certificate Expiration Roulette Why set up automated renewal when you can manually panic-renew certificates at 11 PM on a Sunday?
The Plex Transcoding Power Plant Who knew that transcoding 4K video would turn a server into a space heater? My electricity company, apparently.
Technical “Expertise”
- Linux: I know how to use
sudo rm -rf(but probably shouldn’t) - Networking: Can ping 127.0.0.1 with 95% accuracy
- Security: My firewall is very secure (because I locked myself out)
- Monitoring: Grafana dashboards I don’t understand showing metrics I didn’t know existed
- Backup Strategy: YOLO-driven development
- Disaster Recovery: Googling frantically at 2 AM
The Stack (AKA “The Money Pit”)
- Compute: Assorted servers from various eBay purchases I regret
- Storage: TBs of Linux ISOs and “stuff I’ll need someday”
- Networking: Enterprise gear configured at prosumer competency
- Power: UPS batteries that need replacing (since last year)
- Cooling: Hopes, dreams, and strategically placed fans
- Cable Management: What cable management?
Current Projects
- Actually setting up those backups
- Documenting the network (beyond “it works somehow”)
- Explaining to the family why we need another server
- Making peace with the electricity company
- Accepting that “enterprise at home” might be overrated
- Understanding why monitoring shows everything is fine when nothing works
- Migrating to “the cloud” (giving up is also a valid strategy)
Life Philosophy
“If it’s not broken, you’re not monitoring it properly. If it is broken, you’re monitoring too much.”
“The cloud is just someone else’s computer that actually works reliably.”
“Any sufficiently advanced homelab is indistinguishable from a cry for help.”
Contact
Found a bug? That’s a feature. That’s also not a bug - it’s Tuesday.
Want to share your own homelab disaster stories? Misery loves company.
Thinking about starting your own homelab? Please, save yourself. But if you insist, welcome to the club.
This site is powered by GitLab Pages, Jekyll, and poor life choices. Best viewed in any browser, probably. Last successful deployment: Check the CI/CD pipeline (spoiler: it’s red)