Setting Up My First Homelab (& First Leaflet!)

Unrelated to the everything after this, but this is my first Leaflet! Blogging on atproto is cool and I plan to do more of it.

Yesterday I finally sat down and got the first services running on my new homelab. The computer, an old gaming PC of mine, was already set up and Proxmox VE was installed, but it sat unused and unplugged since late last summer after a nightmare installing the OS.

During the Proxmox setup, it was a series of problem after problem which turned what I thought was a weekend project into multiple months of on and off again troubleshooting. Throughout the entire thing, I used AI to help walk me through it given nearly everything in the shell (or console or terminal or whatever its supposed to be called) seemed to go over my head. Many times this likely caused more problems than it solved, but that was mainly when using Gemini. I just recently started to try Claude and either it seems to work much better or I'm just getting less dumb at this.

So, over the course of the day, I set up Immich and Jellyfin and to my surprise with nothing more than a couple minor errors popped up from start to finish. Everything was relatively easy to figure out and by the end of it, I even felt like I was starting to somewhat understand what it was I was doing. Plus now all of my photos are backed up so I can get rid of Google Photos, and all of our (relatively small, mind you) DVD collection is loaded up and easily accessible from our TVs and other devices.

While I feel that I'm somewhat illiterate when it comes to technology, I have picked up some things over the years and working on this project has already made a big difference in my knowledge level. The biggest problem I'm finding, though, is that the more I learn the more I want to add. My ideas list easily contains months worth of projects already.

All in all, this has been incredibly fun to work on and I cannot wait to continue adding more services to my homelab and (hopefully!) learning some more technical skills along the way. If you're interested in following along, I'll continue posting updates here on Leaflet. Maybe there is even a self-hosted atproto pds in my future?