Introduction

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After a couple of years of home lab experimentation, incremental changes, migrations, workarounds, and lessons learned, I decided to take the environment back to a clean slate and rebuild it with a more deliberate design approach.

The reset itself has already been completed prior to the start of this documentation. The servers, storage, services, and supporting configurations were wiped and returned to a baseline state, but that teardown process was not documented. Rather than focusing on the destruction phase, this project will document the rebuild moving forward. This includes restoring infrastructure, re-establishing management and networking, redesigning service layouts, and rebuilding systems using the experience, preferences, and operational knowledge gained from the previous iterations of the lab.

This rebuild is intended to prioritize clearer architecture, cleaner segmentation, better documentation, and more intentional operational practices from the beginning instead of continuously layering changes onto an already mature environment. I’ll also be using some of the documentation that I previously created and shared with shannonwetnight.com to aid with the restoration process. This will likely include updating some of the articles in the process as well.

A lot of this information contains processes and procedures for things I already know how to do and have been doing, but most of it never gets documented anywhere. This gives me a good opportunity to go through the entire process and have a chance to document as I build so that I can revisit this documentation later if needed, and to share that process with the rest of the world.