Now that I’ve been working on home lab experiments for a while, I’ve taken a bunch of precautions to avoid catastrophic failures. From maintaining multiple standalone devices to deploying private storage servers in remote locations, I’ve even spent a lot of time and a fortune on some of these safeguards, but they’re great for my security-first philosophy and data hoarding needs.

I may have a fairly reliable home lab now, but my early tinkering days were fraught with beginner mistakes. While it’s a bit embarrassing to admit some of the obvious ones, here are some of my server blunders that you’d want to avoid as a fledgling home labber.

Trying to use custom domain names without local DNS overrides

They’re easier to set up than I'd anticipated

My first experience with custom domain names didn’t involve self-hosted services or virtualization platforms. Instead, it was during a university project, where I had to design a web app along with some coding buddies. The thing is, my group had already purchased a domain name for the service, which we then deployed on a VPS. So, I knew the basic terminologies and how to implement custom domain names – at least when it came to URLs that were publicly available.

But when I tried configuring custom domains for my home lab services, I never managed to get them working with Nginx. It took me a while to realize that I needed something to resolve the addresses. After all, since ayush.homelab isn’t available on the Internet, Nginx couldn’t route my traffic to it. The fix was as simple as creating local DNS records, and then using Nginx (or rather, Nginx Proxy Manager’s neat web UI) to route requests to my self-hosted app collection.

Overcommitting storage (and memory) resources to VMs

And letting useless virtual guests remain on my servers

As a teenager, I’d drool over server rigs that could run dozens of virtual machines and hundreds of containers. So, you can imagine what went on in my head when I added a dual Xeon workstation to my home lab. With all its extra computing prowess, I could run tons of virtual guests – partly because I wanted to experiment with DevOps projects, and also because I loved seeing a dashboard littered with VMs and LXCs. Although I was careful about overprovisioning the CPU (and to some extent, memory) resources by keeping a close eye on the operational virtual guests, the amount of storage I’d allocated to my Proxmox LXCs and VMs (mostly virtual machines) was over twice the capacity of my drive pools.

What’s worse, I didn’t realize this mistake until I ran into an error when upgrading to Proxmox 9 a few months ago. The solutions were just as obvious as the problem: deleting several VMs and consolidating all my projects into a handful of virtual guests helped out a ton. For the memory issues, I’d enabled autoboot for the VMs I’d provisioned with Ansible, and these were hogging too much RAM. Disabling this setting and switching to LXCs helped me tackle the excessive memory consumption, which wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t gotten too greedy (and giddy) trying to run more VMs than I needed.

Relying on a single NAS for backups

Luckily, I didn’t have to pay a huge price to realize this mistake

Before I ran into the game-changer called Tailscale, I had major issues with remotely accessing my own nodes – let alone deploying backup servers on external networks. That’s because my home networks have remained afflicted with CGNAT for ages, making external access pretty difficult without certain workarounds. As such, I relied entirely on my custom-built NAS server during the first year of my tinkering misadventures, even though I’d heard a lot about the importance of 3-2-1 backup setups.

Fortunately for my data-hoarding self, the only issue I encountered was a failing drive on my RAID 5 NAS, which I managed to fix by slotting a new HDD into the server and rebuilding the data pool. As soon as I figured out how Tailscale works, I immediately left a NAS at my family’s home, paired it with my local TrueNAS server, and created some Rsync tasks to ensure I wouldn’t lose my backups to hardware failures or unforeseen accidents.

Attempting to virtualize everything in a single node

Sometimes, standalone firewalls (and NAS) are better for experimentation labs

I’m willing to catch some flak for saying this, but I’ll always recommend isolating essential services on separate, bare-metal devices instead of virtualizing them on a single server. Heck, I’ve hosted firewalls, NAS, DNS servers, and other essential tools inside Proxmox virtual machines, and they’ve worked fine for the most part. But considering all the wacky experiments I run on my PVE nodes, it’s not that impossible for my Proxmox home lab to go down alongside the rest of my self-hosted equipment.

As such, I can’t recommend keeping something as important as self-hosted routers and DNS resolvers on the same server that's housing other tinkering projects. I also consider my monitoring services, documentation tools, and Gotify alert hub borderline essential for my home lab, which is why I always run them on a Raspberry Pi. Likewise, my TrueNAS host is a proper NAS, not a VM, as I’d rather avoid any scenarios where my storage server becomes inoperable because of my DIY projects.

Nevertheless, these mistakes were a solid learning experience

Considering the very reason I bought my home lab was to learn more about server projects, I’d say these mistakes were more than just dumb anecdotes I could share with my tinkering buddies (and now you, dear reader). They turned out to be solid learning experiences, and taught me a lot about the importance of bare-metal setups, local DNS records, and (most importantly) redundancy in server environments.