I had grand plans for Labor Day weekend. Sunday night I sat down thinking I'd spend maybe two hours moving my Plex library and a few Docker containers off the ancient Synology box that's been humming in my closet since 2018 and onto a new mini PC I picked up a few weeks back. Two hours turned into most of Sunday, all of Monday, and a Tuesday morning where I showed up to work running on four hours of sleep and looking, according to a coworker, "like I'd been in a fight with a router." Which, honestly, is close to accurate.
The mini PC itself is fine, one of those little N100 boxes that costs less than a decent pair of sneakers and sips power all day. I'm not going to pretend this is a review, but if you're shopping in that category right now, just budget extra for RAM and storage because the base configs are always a joke. Mine came with 8GB and I swapped it for 32 the same night, which took ten minutes and cost more than the computer did. Thats the game now I guess.
The actual pain wasn't hardware. It was that I'd let seven years of "temporary" fixes pile up on the old Synology without ever writing any of them down. A cron job here, a manually edited config file there, a Samba share with permissions I set once in 2019 after a late night and never touched again because it worked. Migrating all that off meant rediscovering my own bad decisions one at a time, usually at 11pm, usually with a beer that had gone warm an hour earlier.
On documentation, or the total absence of it
I say this every couple of years on here and I'll keep saying it: write down what you did to your own systems, even the small dumb stuff. Especially the small dumb stuff. I found a script named fix_thing2_final_REAL.sh that apparently handled some Plex metadata issue, and I have no memory of writing it, no comments inside it, and no idea if it's still needed. I left it running. Future me can deal with that.
The part that actually took the longest wasn't Docker or networking, it was Frigate, the security camera software I run against a couple of old webcams pointed at the driveway and the side gate. Getting object detection to use the mini PC's onboard GPU instead of crawling along on CPU took me down a rabbit hole of driver versions and container base images that ate an entire afternoon. I got it working around 6pm Monday, watched it correctly flag a raccoon as an animal instead of a person for the first time in months, and felt genuinely, embarrassingly proud of myself over it. Small victories.
I keep seeing people online act like self-hosting is this clean, satisfying hobby where you end up with a tidy homelab and a nice diagram of your network. Mine is a shoebox of a mini PC balanced on top of the old Synology (which is now just a backup target, its one remaining job), zip-tied to a shelf bracket that was clearly meant for something else. It works. Nobody's grading the cable management.
One thing I will say in favor of doing this over a long weekend instead of a random Saturday: there's zero pressure to wrap it up by a certain hour, so you actually go back and fix things properly instead of leaving duct tape everywhere. I redid the reverse proxy config twice because the first version worked but I didn't understand why it worked, which is a habit I'm trying to break in myself. If I can't explain a config back to someone else, I don't actually know it, I just got lucky.
The old Synology is going to live on as pure backup storage, which is honestly the job it should've had for the last three years anyway. I'd been asking a NAS to also be a media server, a VPN endpoint, and a camera brain, on hardware from 2018, and wondering why it groaned every time two of those things happened at once. Splitting the load across two machines feels obvious in hindsight. Everything does, after the fact.
Back to my actual job now. The raccoon, for what it's worth, has not been back since Monday, which either means Frigate scared it off somehow or it just found an easier trash can two houses down. I know which one I'm betting on.