Downsizing the Homelab

This series follows the rebuild of my homelab onto smaller, quieter, cheaper hardware: why I took it on, what it actually saved, and what replaced what.

A note on reading order. These posts overlap in time. The hardware swap and the work to get off Windows weren’t separate phases — they were the same few weeks in mid-2026, seen through different lenses. Read them in any order; this is roughly how the events lined up:

• May 31 — GitLab is the first service to move onto the new cluster
• Jun 15 — the internal certificate authority stands up
• Jun 16 — the jump host moves across
• Jun 19 — Home Assistant and Mastodon migrate; the same morning, one node is sitting at 95% memory
• Jun 21 — the Active Directory domain controller follows

The posts below tell that stretch from the hardware-and-power angle. The identity and Windows-eviction work happened over the very same weeks — the same events, a different lens.

• 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.