Notes on building and running a home lab — networking, virtualisation, self-hosting, identity management, and whatever else comes up.

• Migrating Active Directory to Samba, One Domain Controller at a Time

  Replacing two Windows Server 2019 domain controllers with Samba AD via an in-place replica join — preserving every SID so no workstation ever notices, executed across one night and the following day, split by an AI usage-limit reset.

• Preparing the Windows Fleet for Samba

  Before the domain controllers could move to Samba, the rest of the Windows fleet had to come under Ansible management and trust a new root CA — the evening of prep work the migration blitz depended on.

• The Mastodon Migration

  Part 6 of the downsizing series: moving Mastodon off a lone Ubuntu VM onto official Docker images in an LXC, with media offloaded to S3 first — the win that landed the same day FreeIPA got shelved.

• The PKI Detour: A Week on the Wrong Cert Strategy, Three FreeIPA Failures

  Part 5 of the downsizing series: a week chasing the wrong cert strategy, three FreeIPA failures, and why step-ca ended up carrying the PKI load.

• Infrastructure to Build Infrastructure

  Part 4 of the downsizing series: the first commit, the first apply, and pushing the code to the server the code itself built.

• Why I Left XCP-ng for Proxmox

  Before any of the migration, there was a decision I didn't plan to make: the new cluster runs Proxmox, not XCP-ng. A Secure Boot wall, a YouTube channel I've trusted for years, and LXC containers are why.

• Did the Rebuild Actually Save Power?

  Cutting the power bill was one of the main reasons I retired the old servers — so did it work? I couldn't cleanly measure it at the panel, so this is the honest, bounded math: what the old hardware cost, what the mini PCs cost, and how that compares to the energy the AI itself used — then checked, at the last minute, against smart-plug readings on all four boxes that landed within a percent of the estimate.

• Why I’m Replacing a Homelab That Still Works

  The 2026 rebuild starts with a confession: the old setup works fine. I'm replacing it anyway — for power, noise, Windows licenses, and aging hardware.